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Is British English actually better than American English?
I often hear that British English is better than American English, I've also heard people say that British English is "real english", but I'm not really sure why that is ?
what makes it better in your opinion and what makes American English worse ?
personally, I'm indian and I find it much easier to understand American English.
As a linguist, my official perspective can only be that no language or dialect is inherently better or worse than any other. Even Indian English and African American Vernacular English are not worse than either standard British English or standard American English, merely different. One is allowed, of course, to have personal preferences, but those preferences do not reflect some objective reality but rather our own influences and biases. Certain dialects are the prestige dialects in particular communities and thus become the "standard" ones, but this is entirely due to the sociopolitical power of their speakers over time, and there's nothing purely linguistic that sets these standards apart from other dialects -- they just happened to be the ones people in power spoke. English having multiple competing standard dialects is more or less the inevitable result of the historical development of English-speaking countries.
As for why people insist otherwise, it's invariably for reasons that have nothing to do with the actual linguistic features of the language and instead are founded in the sociocultural opinions and biases of the speaker -- sometimes consciously, sometimes unconsciously. Any argument about whether British or American English is "better" will inevitably come down to arguments about history, culture, and society, not linguistics, because there is no objective linguistic basis for the claim that one is better than the other or even any decent linguistic evidence for that claim.
The one caveat I'll give is that writing is a technology that is independent from language itself, so one could make arguments that a certain writing system is objectively better for writing a certain language than another. But British English and American English writing are both too similar for such arguments to make much sense to me, as they share all the same major failings, and the minor details that still differ between them these days are trifles imo.
I like this answer a lot, but I was curious about the last paragraph.
Would you not say that in many ways spoken language is itself a technology, that much like writing systems there are going to be advantages and disadvantages to different languages / language groups for a given set of purposes?
The various dialects of English are much too close to differentiate in this way, and it obviously could get a bit dicey and uncomfortable to try to evaluate other languages thus without it succumbing to sociocultural biases.
It seems to me though that there would be some relatively objective features you could measure, even if I'm not sure what those features would be. Languages that were more information dense perhaps, or those whose structure and lexicon led to greater conciseness or precision or abstract prose.
Of course this would still be very different than saying "language X is better than language Y" as a general statement.
Writing is a technology because it's something that is consciously developed by humans for a purpose -- it's a tool. Spoken (and signed) language by contrast, evolve and are passed on in a much deeper and less conscious level.
When we look at spoken languages, there are various elements of the language that can be more or less complex, which can be described with some degree of objectivity. English case marking and gender marking, which exists only in personal pronouns, is objectively less complex than German case and gender marking (or even just Middle English case and gender marking). However, different languages tend to even out by being more complex in certain areas while being less complex in others. For example, languages without complex case marking will often have more complex rules when it comes to word order. Languages that are described as being "easier" or "having no grammar" tend to be those where the more complex parts are less overt in the morphology. Language evolution can give rise to complexity and irregularity but can also reduce complexity and regularize certain paradigms, so there's an ebb and flow to this. This is also why the standard answer from linguists is that spoken (or signed) languages aren't objectively harder or easier to learn than each other as first languages1. While there are some minor exceptions when it comes to certain systems in particular languages, children tend to acquire different languages at roughly the same rate.
Similarly, my understanding is that natural languages tend to be roughly equivalent when it comes to information density on the whole. This doesn't mean there won't be plenty of individual propositions that can be expressed more efficiently in one language than in another -- but there will almost certainly be plenty of other individual propositions that are less efficient. Information density wasn't something I engaged with as deeply though, so I regrettably can't get much more detailed than this off the top of my head.
Most importantly, it's not really possible to fully separate language and the sociocultural context in which it's spoken. Languages will be deeply shaped by the contexts and cultures in which they're used. This can sometimes lead to the misconception that there's something inherently better about some languages for certain domains -- that English is better for science, for example, because of its robust lexicon of technical terminology -- but ultimately this is confusing cause and effect. English has a robust lexicon of technical terminology because of its use in the sciences, and any other language would quickly develop such technology if it were used in those contexts. Humans are very quick to coin, borrow, and derive new words for concepts that they need to regularly refer to.
There are conlangs that are deliberately constructed with certain principles in mind. Toki Pona is probably the most prominent example -- it's a philosophical language with a deliberately very limited vocabulary that's intended to influence how those who use it think about the world, language, and what they're describing while using it. It's an interesting endeavor, but it only works to the extent that it does because the language is constructed and thus only spoken as a second language, typically only by people who are on board with or at least interested in its philosophical goals. If Toki Pona acquired native speakers, its vocabulary would inevitably expand and the development of "standardized" lexical combinations for certain things (which is discouraged in the Toki Pona community) would inevitably happen. Frankly, even a large enough population of non-native speakers who used the language regularly enough and weren't dedicated to its philosophy would probably inevitably result in things like that.
1 note that this only applies to learning languages as first languages (that is, from a young age) -- languages can be easier or harder to learn later on and this is based almost entirely on how similar they are to one's first language(s).
I don't think this is exactly the same thing, but I remember hearing a talk from someone who worked for an automotive manufacturer, talking about a system they built for minivans to pipe audio from microphones in the front to speakers in back and vice versa, so people could hear each other better. He mentioned that different languages required different audio bandwidth to be intelligible, with Chinese being on the high end. Perhaps not surprising given that it is tonal, but I always thought that was an interesting bit of trivia.
(bit off topic, apologies š )
May I ask if you recall if bandwidth referred to literal acoustic spectra (i.e. frequency range) or the bandwidth used by an encoder (assuming it was pushed over some digital connection)?
Not being a Chinese speaker myself, I was surprised to note that it seems like the language uses phonemic aspiration, and I would totally buy that the high frequency component of an aspirated plosive could be cut off by a notch filter naively attempting to cut down on analog bandwidth. I would hazard that that'd render it much more difficult for a Chinese speaker to understand, since consonants would largely sound the same even though they're aspirated/unaspirated. That wouldn't apply to most digital protocols, though, since they're typically tuned to work on a large variety of languages (and are dramatically more efficient at transmitting data regardless).
I don't think they mentioned hard numbers, but it would be interesting to know!
That's interesting! I wish I knew more about that type of technology so I could opine more on the connection there.
Not a linguist, but languages do have some objective differences but not in measures we'd reliably agree on as having a better direction. For example, spoken languages convey information at roughly the same rate regardless of how quickly it sounds like it's being spoken. Some languages require different pieces of information to be considered, eg. there's languages which encode how reliable a piece of information is (first or second hand) or have more or less tenses or gendered pronouns, but saying any of those features are objectively better is extremely hard. It seems like everyone is capable of conveying or inferring from context all the necessary bits even if their language doesn't require or explicitly encode for it. Some languages maybe make slightly different tradeoffs about what gets priortized.
Also interesting to look at constructed languages which explore a bunch of different features and ideas of languages, but no constructed language has ever really taken off.
Not the OP, but languages are interesting in that:
has developed them, pretty much independently,(edit: reworded per sparksbet's comment below!) whereas written language only develops where there's an impetus (e.g. trade, religion, taxation) and available technology for it (e.g. stoneworking, ceramics, paper, etc.),So I would claim that no, spoken language isn't a technology, any more than our thumbs, eyeballs, or spleens are. IMO, though, one can view it as one of the first tools that humanity, collectively, engineered hand-in-hand with evolution to facilitate communication. Which is pretty cool to me, at least š
[1]: We have evidence that cultural norms embedded into language can affect cognition, though IMO that feels more like a roundabout way to state that practice in any task will affect performance on that task. Haven't kept up to date with the research since, as you note, it can veer off into scientific racism pretty rapidly, and I don't need to expose myself to that for my hobbies!
Cultures developing language independently is technically a mildly controversial take, as languages do descend from other languages rather than developing truly independently, and we don't really have evidence of whether human language originates from a single origin or multiple origins (we simply cannot reconstruct languages back far enough to know one way or another with the evidence we have, and those that claim otherwise are widely regarded as crackpots). But I think the main thrust of your point there is still correct, and we do have examples of language developing independently (and naturally, not like a conlang or something else consciously designed) among humans who lack access to a common language, in the form of pidgins and creoles, and even when they have no access to language whatsoever, as with Nicaraguan Sign Language.
Ach; apologies, I played fast and loose with my terminology :/ reworded, so that hopefully I'm not misleading anyone reading through at a later date!
(context: while writing that, I dug a bit into language deprivation experiments, but I couldn't find anything conclusive enough to back up my claim. I then proceeded to hit enter and forget about that missing fact check š¤¦ me am dumb)
I think it's very normal for those with interest in linguistics to have an "if only I could do a language deprivation experiment without it being wildly cruel/unethical/illegal..." impulse. The development of Nicaraguan Sign Language is probably the closest thing we have to what the results of such an experiment would be (though of course some do still argue that it didn't develop completely independently of outside influence), since severe language deprivation and all the negatives that entails have unfortunately historically been par for the course for deaf people.
And I think your original comment wasn't necessarily misleading, as your underlying point was still solid, so I wouldn't worry about it too much!
Ah! I didn't have an impulse, fwiw XD I just recalled a lecture from back in my university days about the critical period hypothesis re. language acquisition, but was fuzzy on the details. Agreed that the development of home signs into full on sign languages is likely our strongest, most ethical evidence for what language development would've looked like!
I'm interested in your perspective on one part of American English and whether you'd consider it part of the language itself or not:
American English has seen the widespread use of terms that do not mean what the speaker intends to say, the big one being "I could care less". When someone says that, they are trying to say that there is no way they could care less, that they don't care at all, i.e. that they couldn't care any less, but it has been misused so much that the phrase a lot of people use means the direct opposite of what they're trying to say.
Another one is "sodder" instead of "solder". Joining two metal pieces by liquifying metal has nothing to do with clumps of grass or anal sex, but the pronunciation and/or spelling has shifted away from from the original term.
To me, these feel like a quantifiable degregation of the language (albeit minor and niche), and I wonder if you'd consider them relevant or whether you think your points cover them.
So the thing here is that you're looking at this from the wrong perspective. "I could care less" does, in dialects/speaker communities that use it this way, mean what the speaker intends to say, because it's widely used that way and understood that way by listeners. You're right that it doesn't make sense compositionally from combining its constituent parts, but this is not necessary for it to carry a given meaning. Language is absolutely full of phrases that carry meaning that isn't the same as what you'd get if you tried to compose the meaning. Consider phrasal verbs like "give up" or "make do". You cannot derive their meanings by combining the meanings of the individual words therein, but they still carry that meaning. This is incredibly common and normal in language.
Now, the peculiarity of "could care less" is, of course, that the negation particle has been dropped, resulting in a compositional meaning that appears to be the opposite of the phrases actually meaning. This isn't super unique necessarily (consider "fat chance", which means the same thing as "slim chance" and developed its current meaning from widespread sarcastic usage, and most people now use "fat chance" without remotely thinking about what composing its meaning from its parts would mean, as that has become mere etymological trivia), but I understand why it bothers people. It confused me as a child for exactly this reason. That said, I'm not actually convinced "could care less" comes from widespread misuse. I don't think there's any academic consensus on it that I'm aware of, but I suspect the "n't" was lost because it was already a pretty small, unstressed syllable that lacks even a proper vowel. It's common across languages for those to get deleted, especially in rapid speech. Since "couldn't care less" was already established as a common phrase and wasn't something novel that was being analyzed compositionally by listeners but rather understood as a whole phrase, the meaning in context was still clear. I think it's an economy of language thing that resulted in this aparrent contradiction, and once enough people used "could care less" of course other people learned the phrase that way. If speakers of the English language can cope with the existence of contronyms, a set phrase that is used consistently for one meaning that happens to differ from the meaning of its internal components is no trouble for them.
I genuinely have no idea what you're even referencing when you talk about grass or anal sex here. I suppose you might be referring to the word "sod" when you bring up grass? Surely even with no linguistic background, it's clear that words can contain syllables that form different words when used independently without carrying any relation between their meanings. "Bark" has nothing to do with a "bar" either.
Fae already pointed out that the word "solder" does not originally contain an "l" in English. It comes from Middle English "souden/sowden", and the "l" was added as a re-Latinization because the French word that we borrowed ultimately descended from the Latin "solidare". The loss of the "l" is consistent with regular sound changes in Old French (e.g. "pouvre" from "pulverem", "cou" from "collum", "chaud" from "calidus") and the word did not contain an "l" sound when it was borrowed into English. The UK pronunciation with the "l" is a newer spelling pronunciation.
But ultimately it doesn't actually matter that the American pronunciation was the "original" one, because language change is normal and words change pronunciations all the time. Sound changes along with more idiosyncratic changes to individual words are natural and do not negatively affect language in any objective way, they merely result in changes to language over time. And in this case there isn't even any risk of confusion with some similar-sounding word with either pronunciation (though even if there were, that wouldn't necessarily be a real problem, as language change can cope with that too by, for instance, adding material to distinguish confusing homophones).
How would you actually quantify this "degradation" of the language? You don't actually make any attempt to do so here. But even remaining in the realm of the qualitative, this supposed "degradation" is not real. The differences you describe, and many others besides, objectively do not, as you claim in your reply to Fae, reduce the effectiveness of speakers' ability to communicate. To stick with your examples, when someone says "I could care less" in a speaker population where that's the norm, they are communicating equally effectively as someone who says "I couldn't care less" in a population where that's the norm. With this example, in both cases listeners aren't evaluating the compositional meaning of each component because it's a common set phrase, so the mismatch with the compositional meaning does not reduce the effectiveness of the communication. Arguably "I could care less" is communicating the same meaning more efficiently, since it's using one fewer syllable! You could replace either of these phrases with absolute gibberish and as long as it was consistently used and recognized to mean the same thing in a population, that population would not be suffering any degradation or decreased ability to communicate. Similarly, a change in the way the word "solder" is pronounced does not remotely result in any reduction in the ability to efficiently communicate.
Just changing and being different from what you're used to does not constitute degradation, and it's pretty well understood that absent extreme circumstances that we're not discussing here, language maintains the same communicative ability through language changes. A resistance to change is a normal emotional reaction when it comes to something you care about, but that emotional reaction is not scientific and does not entail that there is actually anything bad or wrong or inefficient about language change.
I append ā, if I cared at allā to it so it works without the negation when I hear it / read it.
Iām a āwhomā Stan but I could care less about caring less, if I cared at all.
Ooh that's clever
You are awesome! Thank you for taking the time to compose such thorough responses. I love when linguists get into the nitty-gritty of language.
I'm happy for the opportunity to share! I enjoy getting into the nitty gritty of language myself and miss getting to do so in an academic context, so it's nice to get to share with people here on Tildes.
Thanks, I appreciate the insight. I guess I was thinking about it from the perspective of communication between groups that use one form vs the other, and the disjoint that can cause. I remember frequently seeing people not understand what someone was trying to say when they said "I could care less" maybe 10 or 15 years ago, I suspect because it's not intuitive to someone who hadn't heard that form before that it was a contraction/morphing of "I couldn't care less". When that change occured originally, I'd classify that as a degradation because it reduced the ability to communicate with people unfamiliar with the new form of that phrase.
I think its ubiquity now is does mean it's continued usage is just a dialect choice rather than better or worse, because it is widely understood to mean the same thing.
When "fat chance" first came about, if people hadn't said it with a sarcastic tone I imagine it would have caused confusion, because the only reason we understand what it means is due to familiarity with it - it's not something you can understand from the meaning of the constituent parts.
I think the thing that sets "I could care less" a bit apart from other examples you mentioned, however, is that to someone unfamiliar with it as a phrase, it is not nonsensical if you try to parse it from its constituent parts and therefore does not flag to the unfamiliar reader as something that shouldn't be parsed as constituent parts, hence why it could be (and was) a source of confusion to people unfamiliar with it as a phrase. When a phrase shifts from something parsable from constituent parts to not being so, I would say that's a pretty clear degradation - it's not the addition of a new phrase like "fat chance", it is the morphing of an existing one, and the morphed one requires familiarity with the phrase as a whole whilst the non-morphed one doesn't.
Personally the existence of contranyms feels like a bad thing, linguistic baggage that we carry that makes English as a whole a worse language. I'd say that if a new meaning to an existing word was adopted today that meant the opposite to its existing meaning, that would be a degradation of the language. Similarly phrasal verbs seem like an artifact of a misshapen, lumbering language, and to me feel like something that makes the language worse as a whole. I think the crux of my point was that shifts in the language that add more unintuitive idiosyncrasies feel like they make the language worse, and I was exploring if American English has added idiosyncrasies that make the language harder to use.
On sodder, your guess at what I meant is correct, and Fae informed me where my understanding/assumption was wrong, which I appreciated. Knowing the term in my dialect as solder, sodder sounds like the 'sod' is the stub that the word is formed from, much like maker from make. In British English, sod can mean the top layer of turf or a general pejorative term derived from the biblical association with Sodom (used in phrases like "you sod", "doing sod all", "sod off", etc., hence the association I drew with anal sex).
I think it is commonplace to try and parse a word or phrase you don't understand from the meaning of it's constituent parts when it feels like it might be a composite term or phrase, and so it is natural for someone who doesn't know a word or phrase to draw associations between it and known understanding of constituent parts of the word or phrase. I think this is the case with something like sod-der or sold-er, but not with something like bar-k.
To address your question about quantifying degradation, I would say that a change in language that makes it make less intuitive sense and makes it harder to learn for someone trying to pick up the language is a degradation of the language. I get that's a narrow viewpoint and language is about a lot more than just ease of learning, but English is notoriously hard to learn when it comes to similar languages because of how many complexities and nuances it has, and the amount of things governed by arcane rules that don't seem to make sense. I think something that makes that harder quantifiably makes the language worse from that perspective, which is what I was originally trying to examine - clearly you are knowledgeable in linguistics, I was interested in your perspective on changes in language that appear to make it more obfuscated, especially where those are differences between British and American English.
I found your first long comment on the subject interesting and insightful, but the points you made didn't seem to cover this part of change in language, hence my question. In contrast, I found both Fae's and your responses to my question felt pretty combative and/or hostile. I have no clue if that was intended, or if my question came across as combative and/or hostile and hence warranted such a reaction - that was not my intention if it did.
Nope just interested in the topic and felt pointing out that you undermined your own argument twice, and thus IMO disproved your thesis, was the clearest way to respond. Putting the way you speak in a place of superiority over another's more inferior speech will nearly always result in a typo at minimum, it's basically a rule of the internet.
If you care, your responses here didn't come across remotely hostile to me. Do you have a linguistics background?
I don't. I'm just interested in it for the same reasons I like folklore and foodways.
As for whether I care, I am still processing your previous post to me and not really sure how I feel about it all, mostly still pretty upset/hurt about it all frankly. Hence not ignoring the question or responding with a polite smoothing over as if everything is fine.
So since you asked, I don't know. In case there's confusion from anyone, this is bluntness, not hostility.
I'll be honest, I was half asleep when I wrote the original comment I made (and clearly when I read your response) because it wasn't until just now that I realised I had written degregation rather than degradation in that first comment!
And like I said, it's fine, I understood you, and the English language and society in general was no worse off for it.
It's only the irony that was relevant.
These are also not really quantifiable, though. How do you quantify how much "intuitive sense" a language change makes? Intuition varies between people and is highly dependent on their linguistic and sociocultural experiences. From a scientific perspective, we can compare how common a particular language change is cross-linguistically, but this measure would differ wildly from what you as a non-linguist consider "intuitive" (and, of course, suffers from the usual limits that language documentation imposes on linguistic typology). Even if quantifying how "intuitive" a single individual change is weren't impossible, one would need to consider any change within the context of the language as a whole, as the presence of similar/competing forms is a huge factor in language change.
When it comes to language learning, the ease of learning a second language is overwhelmingly determined by how similar it is to one's first language(s), so this cannot be relied upon for the form of quantification you describe. The influence of a speaker's first language(s) is too large a confounding factor for any objective measurement. As for ease of acquisition as a first language, changes of the type you mention are not remotely significant enough, even in large aggregate numbers, to impact that in any remotely measurable way. Children have no more difficult a time learning that the arbitrary phrase "I could care less" is used in certain contexts to mean "I couldn't care less" -- even my own childhood experience questioning the form of this construction wasn't spurred on by difficulty acquiring this construction, but confusion/curiosity about why the saying was formed that way on a more meta, academic level.
One could even argue that the spread of the phrase "I could care less" in the first place serves as counterevidence that it is less intuitive or more difficult to learn, since it appears to have at least partially displaced the older "I couldn't care less"! Or that the increase in efficiency from removal of a syllable is strictly beneficial, since there is a very low risk of confusion as to the phrase's meaning in the contexts where it's used -- tone of voice and surrounding context almost always make it overwhelmingly clear that the sentiment conveyed is "I don't care at all" even to someone who was unfamiliar with the expression, and the potential alternative interpretation of "I could care less" isn't a sentiment that's super frequently expressed in similar ways. I'm not necessarily saying these are ironclad claims, fwiw, or even arguing for them, but rather pointing out that the one could come at this issue with the opposite opinion of what amounts to "intuitive" or "better" language.
I don't think changes like this one actually amount to obfuscation of language in any meaningful way. I think that you're attributing far more to the difference between these two variants of this expression than is actually justified linguistically because one is used in your dialect and one is not. That's an understandable way to feel and gut reaction to have, but that doesn't amount to it being well-founded in a scientific sense -- and linguistics is, after all, a science. If we're going to make claims about language, we need a better foundation and better evidence for them than our gut reactions.
There are examples of language change that I think could be described more accurately as "obfuscation of language", but these are larger in scope -- sound changes leading to opaque, irregular inflectional forms rather than more regular, transparent systems, for instance, or resulting in greater numbers of potentially confusing homophones. But I attempted to address these in my earlier comments, at least briefly, by pointing out that these changes, when sufficiently disruptive, are generally accompanied or followed by other changes that add greater clarity: inflectional systems with irregularities tend to undergo regularization over time (especially with less common forms), and confusing homophones can lead to speakers switching to less ambiguous synonyms for one of the meanings or adding further material to disambiguate them (e.g., people who have the pin-pen merger, resulting in those common words becoming homophones, using new words like "ink pen"). An ebb and flow in complexity and obfuscation in order to maintain a consistent ability to communicate is characteristic of language, and neither type constitutes "degradation". There is no ideal better form of language from which any deviation is a departure.
My responses have not been hostile, and have been combative only to the extent that any disagreement must combat that which one disagrees with. Your misconceptions about language and beliefs about certain changes constituting degradation of language, quantifiable or otherwise, are common but not substantiated scientifically, and I'm doing my best to explain it in a way that fully addresses what you seem to believe/claim from your comments.
If I appear particularly fervent in making these arguments (though I don't feel like I am in these comments, personally -- there are conversations on Tildes where I've gotten heated, but this is not one of them), it's because these same common beliefs about the concept of "language degradation" taken only slightly farther have been and are still used to perpetuate a lot of real-world harm against people whose language differs from an arbitrary standard. I don't think disliking "could care less" amounts to this on its own, but the exact same scientifically unsubstantiated claims are used to dismiss other differences in non-prestige dialects, such as AAVE's copula deletion or habitual-be, presenting these dialects as inferior and degraded despite the extremely strong linguistic evidence that said dialects are equally complex and expressive as the prestige dialects with which they are so often unfavorably compared. There are real-world consequences to embracing the unscientific, vibes-based concept of "language degradation", and combatting those ideas is one of the few truly practical positive effects linguists can have on society.
I think the tone I picked up on from your responses was "you are wrong" and a hint of "and you should feel bad for seeing it this way", when my intent was "is this the case, does this line of enquiry hold any merit" rather than "this is objective truth".
For instance, I think I had a good stab at explaining the concept I used intuitive as shorthand for, for want of a better term, (being able to work out meaning from knowing the meaning of composing parts), and I feel like you didn't really acknowledge or explore that at all.
With language learning, it makes sense that complexity and sensical rules only really come in to play with learning second languages with how language immersion and learning how to communicate by observation work. I wonder if there is a component of linguistic complexity making a language harder to learn irrespective of the language you come from, even if primary language similarity is the dominant indicator of ease to learn. My personal experience is having studied French and Spanish at the same time at school. I might be wrong on this, but they feel very similar and about equally close to English in form and construction (stuff like gendered words, standardised patterns of declension, etc.), but French was so much harder for me to try and learn because of its complexity and having more rules with exceptions and special cases. For instance, one of the things I really liked about Spanish and that made it far easier to learn for me was that sounds and written language has a 1:1 mapping - whenever you see something written you will know how to pronounce it (and similarly be able to transcribe anything you hear) if you know the mapping between sound and written syllables, which certainly isn't true of English and I don't believe is true of French. In that case, it was something that was less similar to my native language but made the language far easier for me to pick up.
Disclaimer: I am going off my memory of what my French and Spanish teachers told me 20 years ago, it might be completely wrong!
My line of reasoning has been that if there is a measure of objective complexity making a language harder to learn (even if it's a secondary factor), it wouldn't be intellectually rigourous to ignore that when discussing whether there is any ability to classify one language as better than another, even if it is a minor factor and overall not indicative of the 'worth' or 'merit' of a language.
The examples that we have used have been trivial and by no means evidential of complexity or communicative ability of the language or dialects as a whole, but I was using them to illustrate a pattern I had observed in the language (that may or may not be accurate).
I appreciate your response and further explanation here - the bits I haven't responded to are the ones that were informative and have shaped my understanding of the topic more, rather than me ignoring or dismissing them.
Edit: I've just read a bit about null/zero copula, and it's applicability to English in its various forms, casual slang, newspaper headlines, sports commentary, and AAVE phraseology, and to me that feels like it's a bit different from the discussion we've had - when I read those examples on Wikipedia, none of the changes from the phrase with copula to phrase without feel like they make the term any harder to understand. Perhaps this is just my familiarity with such construction and so it doesn't read as different or confusing, but something like "how you doing" as opposed to "how are you doing" doesn't convey less information; as far as I'm aware, there is no other interpretation that could be extrapolated from "how you doing", and the 'are' is a bit of a linguistic appendix, with it's usage or omission not actually changing the meaning of concepts communicated by the individual elements of the phrase, which is not the same with the omission of a negator like in "could care less". Perhaps this is more ignorance on my part and there are times where copula removal has lead to the constituent parts not conveying the same meaning as the whole when they used to? None come to mind for me - do you know of any?
I get that this feels like a bit of a dangerous line of intellectual curiosity because of the similarity of the argument I've been making to preferential aggrandising of one dialect over another - from what I understand, particularly when it comes to AAVE - but I feel like unfamiliarity doesn't explain friction with difference here in the same way it does there - is there something I'm missing here?
I brought up AAVE's zero copula in part because I thought it was an example of people deriding a language feature for being wrong and degrading language in a context where the lack of linguistic merit of their arguments would (hopefully) be clearer. You're absolutely right to notice that the presence or absence of a copula is generally not semantically meaningful (and, indeed, zero copula languages are extremely common worldwide).
Probably an example that comes closer to your "could care less" example while still being a bigger deal irl and thus having had people write about it more would be negative concord. This is often referred to as "double negatives" in English classes and derided as being not only wrong, but illogical. The argument is often made that logically two negatives must cancel each other out and therefore using negative concord to express a negative is using language wrong, and this argument is made despite the fact that negative concord is widespread through a huge number of English dialects. Negative concord is, in fact, the standard way of expressing negatives in some other languages. While one could claim that negative concord is inferior because it is "illogical" and "unintuitive", this is a value judgment that is not based on any actual scientific evidence, but rather on one's feelings about language due to the linguistic and sociocultural context you were raised in. In fact, there's evidence that negative concord is actually easier to learn, which puts your two metrics for what constitutes language degradation at odds with each other!
Of course the change from "couldn't care less" to "could care less" isn't the same as negative concord, but I hope that the greater similarity due to the fact that they both involve negation. Plus, I found the linked study on negative concord on accident and wanted to share.
I did roughly understand that's what you were aiming at, but my main point in my repeated challenging of what counts as "intuitive" is that if you're going to use something as a measure of a language's merit or even complexity, you need to rigorously justify your choice of measure on a scientific basis, not just decide on one based on your own opinions. Why is lack of non-compositional phrases a better measure of a language's quality than the communicative efficiency that such structures arguably enable, for example? Why is more complexity worse when it often leads to significantly less ambiguity and reliance on context clues? What I'm trying to communicate is that even when you attempt to define these things more objectively, they still ultimately rely on subjective opinions of yours unless you can justify them more rigorously.
The existence of phrases with non-compositional meaning is so widespread throughout language that it would be difficult, to compare languages on this basis in aggregate. I also don't have the same intuition as you that this is more common in American than British English. Certainly I don't think speakers of a dialect with the phrase "Bob's your uncle" should turn up their noses at "could care less". Neither makes much sense if one were to interpret it purely compositionally, but that's true of a staggering variety of expressions throughout languages worldwide. I think the sheer universality of non-compositional phrases cross-linguistically indicates that they cannot be making language worse or more difficult -- or at least that whatever degree of difficulty they do add is compensated for by other types of utility.
I think I addressed this mostly in my top level comment iirc, but it can absolutely be the case that certain systems are more complex in a given language than in another. It's just that we've found that on the whole, this will be balanced out by other systems being simpler. There are a few small (and interesting) exceptions, but on the whole linguistic evidence from first language learning indicates that languages tend to be about equally complex when one takes into account all the systems in a language on the whole. Some systems are much more visible to the adult language learner than others, especially depending on their current level of skill with a given language, so this can give learners an impression that a certain language is more complex in general because they're not considering or not yet familiar with the other systems in which the tables are turned.
Modern linguists tend to focus on more interesting questions than trying to compare languages as being better or more intuitive or more complex -- we care far more about how or why certain constructions arise and stick around in languages than debating their merit. For instance, you bring up grammatical gender -- which objectively does add complexity compared to just not having it. But what's more interesting to linguists is why it exists (and is relatively common worldwide) in that case. How did it arise? What utility does it serve? Afaik there are a bunch of theories surrounding that and things like it, and that's ultimately a much more grounded and imo more interesting approach to studying languages.
I find negative concord fascinating in English, because in a lot of cases in common usage negative concordance has a completely different tone to straight positive. For instance, usage in my circles of something like "I could do this" generally has a pretty lackadaisical vibe, like "I don't really care about this one way or the other" compared to "I couldn't not do that" which has the vibe of almost a strong magnetism or compulsion that the person felt towards doing the thing. Thinking about that more has made me realise how silly my prior argument was in a way, because of how much unsaid meaning and context is in encoded in the common usage of those phrases despite how that extra layer of meaning is in no way implied by the constituent parts of either phrase, interesting stuff!
Yeah, I think it wouldn't be controversial to say non-compositional phrases are more linguistically complex than compositional ones. I guess I was going "well, if you think about it in terms of does this linguistic complexity serve a purpose" which looks at it assuming that linguistic complexity is inherently a bad thing. I see now that you were trying to point out that assumption I had made - I hadn't even picked up on the fact that I was making an assumption there! I think something does feel inherently different and weird to me about a phrase morphing/evolving from compositional to non-compositional (as opposed to a new non-compositional phrase coming about), but I see now that that might just be unacknowledged bias on my part. I guess part of it is phrases like "bob's your uncle" feel like they add character and charm to a language, whilst a shift from couldn't to could in "I could care less" feels like an error, similar to "could've" -> "could of". I guess I was trying to set aside the preference bit to see if I could find an objective measure that explained why it felt different and bad to me, but perhaps it genuinely is just a preference thing.
Gendered language and why it is so prevalent is such an interesting one. I'd be really interested to hear you expand on that - do you know of any purpose it does serve? Coming from a language broadly without grammatical gender, I hated it as a kid learning French and Spanish, it seemed so useless and unnecessary, adding a bunch of complexity for zero benefit - who cares is the table is female, it just means I have to remember an arbitrary flag for every noun, which seemed insane to me. I guess there's got to be some merit to it, or languages with it would have trended towards using the dominant/easier to say gender for everything? I guess in French and Spanish words often sound better when paired with the appropriate article ("la mesa" has a much nicer flow than "el mesa") would. Hm, maybe that is because 'el' sounds a bit clunky in certain phrases more than 'la'? As a counterexample to the previous, "la dinero" sounds no worse than "el dinero" to my ear.
I share this intuition, and I'm glad it was illuminating for you! I'll nitpick slightly and say that what you describe is a double negative rather than negative concord -- negative concord is specifically when the presence of multiple negatives doesn't swap the meaning to a positive, as in "I ain't never going there".
There's actually a lot of interesting work about the shift from "could've" to "could of" fwiw! This reddit thread contains some info and links, but the linguistic tl;dr is that even if it ever was just a spelling mistake, it definitely isn't just that anymore! This is more me jumping on the opportunity to share some trivia than it is any sort of a correction lol
I'm not an expert on grammatical gender specifically, but I had heard in the past that agreement of this type makes it easier to interpret utterances in imperfect contexts, such as when you can't hear every word clearly? But I'd have to do some digging to see if there are other more detailed discussions of what utility grammatical gender provides.
Prior to the great vowel shift it would have been pronounced with a "sooder" and the "solder" (UK but not all of the UK apparently) pronunciation with the "l" being added back into the word (which came from Latin solidare to the French soudure or souder to English and then regained its L in the 15th century ish. ) is actually the newer one.
So "sodder" coming from "soo-der" is probably more "accurate" or "original" than "sol-der" and has nothing to do with "sod" as in grass or as half the prefix that implies non-PIV sex (sodom not sod, and it applies to anything not intercourse in its religious sense, not just anal if you're getting technical about it which we are )
I make this point because you used an example that absolutely undermines your argument. I could as easily say " 'Solder?' It isn't about "selling" anything, so why in the world would you use a more modern, trashier pronunciation than 'sodder,'" with a sneer.
Probably less so than "degregation" - of course I understood you, and so it doesn't really matter other than I'm again highlighting it as you undermining your own point.
What is a degradation of language? Why are things you dislike inherently a downgrade even if not supported by historical evidence? How is language lesser or better if it communicates its meaning well?
Sparks will say stuff better than me, but I felt the example was too useful not to highlight.
Interesting, thanks for the insight, I didn't know about that. I guess the thing that confused me about that one was pronouncing it sodder when it was spelt solder, but that might have been ignorance on my part too.
I think when language shifts such that the meaning of words or phrases does not align with what the speaker is trying to express I'd call it a degradation. It reduces the effectiveness or ability to communicate, which is the whole point of language.
I don't know whether there are other examples of this in American English when compared to British English, or, in fact, British English when compared to American English - none spring to mind - so it might just be that one phrase.
But when people say "I could care less" there's very little confusion, as we all understand what they mean. And as this was a complaint about teens when I was a teen this is now something that adults understand just fine, but teens and subcultures talk in slang all the time and are often trying only for intra-group understanding. (And half the time we said it to piss parents off because the valley accent that came with it was inherently irritating to Midwestern parents IME)
It's no less sensical than rhyming slang or referencing pop culture or saying it's a "doggie dog" world because you've never seen it written down. Or using chat speak as I did above, or saying "piss parents off" despite urine not being relevant. Or using the word "literally" hyperbolically.
College students text like:
And I can read that just fine. (I probably fucked something up there it reads too much like standard English tbh) But more importantly they can communicate just fine with it. And ask them if they give a "shi" if people outside their intended audience understand it.
Are the British "degrading" language by saying "lef-ten-nent" instead of "loo-ten-nent?" No because language changes, and that's always been how it works. Hell, spelling was way more intuitive when everyone basically made up their own ways of spelling words rather than making it so that cough and through don't rhyme or share a vowel sound.
I think you made a really interesting point here with the example of
I find that incredibly hard to parse, I'm sure in large part from unfamiliarity. Mentally I'm expanding it to
Interpretation aside, I think it's such a significant linguistic change that I wonder whether - if this standardises as modern English or if it splits off as a dialect - it would be as significant a shift as from something like Middle English to what I think of as modern English (the English I grew up with, basically).
Already English has significantly shifted for me over the course of my lifetime: both in terms of specific usage like me having broadly dropped trailing full stops when not writing in full paragraphs as they feel implied and therefore not useful, with the use of them having become something of a tone signifier, and in my general approach to language development. As a teenager I was pretty set in my ways about the English I'd been taught being correct and endeavouring to resist the slide away from that, but in my 20s I transitioned from seeing language as descriptive rather than proscriptive: the change in the ascribed meaning of a word or term signifying the shifting of the definition of the word rather than the incorrect usage of the word, for instance.
I've seen my own views and usage shift even more within the past five years: I now often lean in to what feels right even if it would be seen by others as incorrect and I often reach for the term, phrase, or grammatical construction that feels like it fits rather than is commonly used. For instance, if I were writing dialogue between characters speaking in British English, I would probably spell lieutenant leftenant, because that would communicate what I was hearing in my head better, especially to an audience unfamiliar with that British idiosyncrasy. I think this has been exacerbated for me with the rise of LLM usage and the loss of personality in a lot of written English I see: news articles, website pages, etc. I find I now often lean into something that has the vibe of what I want to say even if it isn't the norm as a way of holding on to expressiveness, and often lean into metaphor. I stopped reading for many years due to life and illness, having only just got back to it in the last year or so, and I've found it so refreshing hearing characterful, poetic language again (Bronte's beautiful language in Wuthering Heights, for example). I think it's something I enjoy about conversing with people here on Tildes too, picking up on the stylistic patterns of people who you begin to recognise.
For reference, as I'm writing this autocorrect is peppering it with red squiggles, trying to suppress British spelling (perhaps I could change that, I don't know. It becomes wearisome to do that for every new program I use).
I'm definitely rambling a lot here, I guess I just find language a really interesting topic and want to talk about it more than I have things of interest to say!
Would you entertain the option of presenting your own, or would that be too unprofessional, even in this friendly setting? ;)
I mean, I'd be lying if I didn't say I love how a lot of dialects from the UK and Ireland sound on an aesthetic level lol. While this is very much influenced by the sociocultural context I was raised in, that doesn't make the effect less real!
I tried to think of more specific examples but they all immediately flew out of my head upon reading your comment I think lol.
Excuse me, if British English isnāt better then how come theyāve spoken it since the time of the Romans?
The language of Shakespeare, Milton, and the Bible!
I do not support the sentiments expressed by Henry Higgins in this clip, nor does he represent linguistic consensus.
This is one of the most subjective questions ever.
You might as well ask what color is best.
They're also extremely similar, they're the same language, just regional dialects. Americans have no trouble understanding standard RP English, and people from the UK have no issues understanding general American English.
There is much more variation in dialects within the US and UK than on average between them. As an American, I have a much easier time understanding someone speaking RP English than I do understand deep southern US accents.
I translate my grandfatherās specific deep southern US English for my kids and wife. And I translate my kidsā specific midwestern US English for my grandfather.
What words do you find are hard for your grandfather or kids to understand in each direction? I'm curious as a biased Midwesterner which of our words are hard to understand!
Comprehension for my grandfather would probably be better if he wasnāt fairly old and didnāt use hearing aids. Imagine a look of confusion and a pause, then I say it in a way that āfeelsā right to his ears and he immediately gets it. In most cases that just means restating what was said with slightly different vowel sounds, intonation, etc. Occasionally more severe changes are needed, for example translating āThe hot dish wasnāt too badā to āThe casserole was really good!ā
Comprehension for the kids would probably be better if they talked to him more often, but it feels like their great-grandfather may as well be speaking a foreign language half the time. An example would be āDid you like the truck we sent you?ā And after the look for confusion and pause I say āHe said: āDid you like the truck we sent you?āā Then the kid says āItās not a bad truck.ā which I translate to āI love it!ā
I too have learned the ways of the midwest.
You make some good points that are undermined by the fact that orange is objectively the best color.
I was hoping that someone wouldn't notice that flaw in my argument...
I like the playful teasing and banter between Americans and Commonwealth folk about which is better. But the reality is that at the end of the day the differences are so minor and inconsequential that I myself have to look up whether the American spelling is "gray" or "grey". Although I realize I'm opening myself up to a joke about the American education system by admitting that ;)
The mnemonic I learned is A for American or E for England. Some of my friends seem to think the different spellings refer to different ranges of shades, so there's that angle too.
American English uses both grey and gray fwiw, with the specific choice being personal preference or based on whichever style guide you're following. Afaik the UK exclusively uses grey but I'm not 100% on that side of things.
I actually think of them as slightly different colors, one being warmer and one being cooler. I won't say which is which because, so far, everyone I've asked to guess has guessed right (or has even already made the same color distinction themselves).
I think this is something that has been observed before, but I can't recall if it's ever had a proper study done. You're definitely not unique in this respect, though!
As someone from the UK, I can confirm that the UK (or at least one person there) uses both grey and gray and can never remember which one they are 'supposed' to use, hence them having become completely interchangeable in modern British English also (or at least, in the very specific dialect spoken by at least one person in the UK).
I wonder where the misconception that it's a regional thing came from, then? A historical thing? Or maybe certain big style guides in each country make one seem to appear more often? Curious.
I was being somewhat facetious here, it might just be me that has no idea which word we use and hence uses both interchangeably - I think technically the UK does have a correct spelling for grƦy, but to be honest British English is basically Britican English at this point given how the internet and word processing applications default to American English.
I still put a 'u' in all my words because it feels correct and I like how it looks, but grey and gray are fundamentally interchangeable in my head and to me declaring one as correct feels like a fools errand, adding an unnecessary thing to remember for no gain.
Ah, I understand. I've had the opposite thing happen to my use of punctuation with quotation marks, probably in part due to exposure to people writing in British English -- I know the proper way to do it within the typical US English punctuation rules, and I think I also know the (different) typical UK punctuation rules, but in my own writing in an informal context (like here on Tildes) I use a weird, inconsistent Frankenstein approach that doesn't conform to any accepted norm.
Like others have said, there's no objectively better or worse variety of English and it's mostly a matter of preference, exposure or context. In many parts of Europe, we are taught British English, while in much of Latin America, American English is more common because of geography, media influence, etc.
I'm no expert but I believe that even if you tried to choose a better one by asking which is closer to original English, it still wouldn't give a clear winner. British English is geographically closer to where English developed, but American English preserves some older features that later changed in many British accents, especially things like pronouncing the r in words such as car or hard. Some American vocabulary, like fall instead of autumn, also reflects older English usage.
Which one is easier to understand usually depends on what you've been exposed to more, and for many people that's American English because of videogames, movies, music, internet and a looong etc.
āBetterā is a hard thing to argue, both because itās completely subjective, and because language and culture are intertwined in ways that make ranking languages or dialects hard to separate from ranking people groups and I really donāt think we want to go there.
For example the American Appalachian accent is a beautiful regionalism but it's unfairly maligned for āsounding stupidā to the degree that many local Appalachians are deliberately un-training themselves from using it, and assimilating into the broader standard American dialect. (Internal migration plays a role in this too, as outsiders move into the region, bringing their dialects with them.) I think itās sad when cultural distinctiveness erodes like this. @sparksbet mentioned AAVE, which famously gets a lot of criticism for āsounding stupidā as well ā but thatās a flatly racist critique. You canāt criticize a way of speaking without criticizing the people who speak that way.
Maybe youāre just asking about written English rather than spoken accents?
Some of the biggest differences between written British English and American English can be directly traced back to Noah Websterās spelling reform project of the early 19th century. Personally Iām not a fan of that sort of prescriptivist campaign; I think theyāre generally ill-advised and paternalistic. Moreover, they probably wouldnāt even be possible in the internet age. But he did it then, and the hard fork persists today so letās talk about it. (Not to imply he caused the split, but he certainly helped codify and standardize it at a time when the distinctions were still pretty loose and murky.) All things considered, I think the reformed spellings in American English generally are an improvement for the way they simplify and phoneticize the language, making it more suitable for global adoption.
In my (American) opinion British spellings often contain superfluous letters ā think āuā in ācolour,ā ālā in ātravellerā, āmeā in āprogramme,ā and āqueā in āchequeā (which is shortened to ācheckā when Americanized). To me those decorative/formal bits read as aloof, Old World aristocracy. Maybe Iām overthinking it but to me theyāre vestigial relics of British colonialism. I feel that even more pointedly when discussing actual former colonies like India, Australia, South Africa, etc. Itās an oversimplification, and probably a naive one, but I feel that those countries still using British spelling are the ones who originally had it put upon them by the Empire, whereas the ones that lean toward American English adopted it more organically in response to American influence in commerce and entertainment. I mean itās all hegemony either way but the latter feels less icky to me. Less coercive. Honestly thatās all history at this point though, water under the bridge. People speaking their own native tongues donāt usually feel oppressed for doing so.
Beyond that, itās just personal preference and cultural momentum. We typically favor the way we personally, and those we interact with most, write and speak. Because it feels normal. Thatās a natural bias to have.
Iām curious if youāre asking about this because your social interactions include more of a mix of Englishes, making it harder to establish a baseline. Iām not sure what your situation is like but Iāve worked with a number of Indian and Pakistani colleagues, some who emigrated to America and others who were remote members of my virtual team, and I can see how that placed them right at the intersection of the two Englishes. They may have felt some odd pressure to āchooseā a favorite as well, in a way that Iāve never had to. Thatās interesting.
For the record, spelling reform is not necessarily prescriptivist, at least not in the linguistic sense that's used when describing things like the fake grammar "rules" you learn in many English classes (even if these tend to be propagated by the same school settings where spelling is learned). Writing systems are inherently prescriptive to some extent because it is not an inherent part of language, but a human invention. If there is any standardization of a writing system whatsoever, it must be prescriptive, because there isn't a more natural, scientifically-justified descriptive alternative the way there is when it comes to the grammar of spoken language. Spelling reform is often deliberately an attempt to better reflect the descriptive realities of spoken language compared to spellings that have become outdated due to language evolution, and as such can sometimes be pretty keenly less prescriptivist than the status quo they're attempting to reform. But of course that depends a lot on the details of a particular spelling reform and its implementation.
Thanks for the clarification. I appreciate you lending your expertise here and throughout the thread!
Aw thanks! it's fun to have the opportunity to share what I know. Linguistics is my first love and I'm always excited to help other people learn more about it.
You could probably develop some degree of 'most rational' language/dialect based on factors such as:
My understanding as a layperson is that English is a fairly garbage language by those sorts of metrics.
All that said, it does not in any way suggest the 'betterness' (and social implications of that), but it's an interesting possibility to explore.
But written language, particularly in English, encode etymology in addition to (or perhaps moreso than) phonetics.
None of those factors are necessarily desirable in a language though.
In many cases, ambiguity is a feature, not a bug. For instance, when starting a romantic relationship, a lot of people will say stuff like "oh we're just talking right now".
Talking could mean passing each other in the hallway and having a conversation every so often, going out for coffee a few times, going on regular dates, or just meeting up for sex. The ambiguity is the point, it's not undesirable.
There are countless examples of words and phrases that mean one thing if you're in the "in group", and mean something else entirely if you're not.
Those are very intentional characteristics that serve a specific function, they're not deficiencies with the language.
Yea. I think it frankly serves more of a 'ease of people to speak as a second language' metric now that I think about it.
Less likely to cause a "my hovercraft is full of eels." situation.
You conflate written and spoken language here, but considering only the factors that do apply to spoken language, your choices are fairly arbitrary and don't really conform to a rigorous idea of what makes a language more "rational". Who decides what the "accepted rule of thumb" is and why are exceptions considered a deficiency in the language rather than a failure to construct a sufficiently descriptive rule of thumb? How does the existence of homophones (which I assume is what your uniqueness factor is describing?) inherently less rational -- surely one could argue it's more efficient to make use of the same shorter string of phonemes when there's no risk of confusion between the two meanings? What counts as an idiom and why are they considered inherently irrational rather than an efficient use of existing linguistic material?
These are rhetorical questions meant as food for thought about why this is at best a more complex endeavor than it first appears.
I guess you could argue that neocolonialism is better than the kind of colonialism where guys in pith helmets chopped peoples hands off, but neither are really great.
There's also the point that most of the cultures that the US subjugated in our own form of regular, old school style colonialism are dead, or are relegated to reservations where they unsurprisingly mostly also speak American English.
Many of them speak American English at home thanks to the residential schools program. (also true in Canada - for Canadian English)
As another Indian, this could be because American media is much more common. Most of my exposure to British English was at school, whereas only a small amount of the media I consumed used British English.
From a philosophical point of view, there is no objective truth, only a perceived truth through evidence. 'Which language is better' highly depends on what you value in language.
That said, my personal view is I don't really mind. I like the quaintness of British. I also find it fascinating how American has became so diverse linguistically in such a relatively short time in history. From the So-Cal Valley girl, to the Deep Southern accent. Minnesotan, Boston and the 'I'm walking' 'ere-New York accents.
Well, it's a much bigger country. I think long distance travel was probably more difficult for more of Britain's history than the US, but it would take about 15-20 days to walk from one end of Britain to the other. It would take 6 months to do the same in the Continental US.
I think that likely contributed to the differences in geographic patterns of accents as well. An American from New York sounds extremely different than one from Alabama, but the NY and NJ accent are pretty much the same thing, and most people would be hard pressed to tell the difference between an Alabama and Mississippi accent.
In the UK, people from a county over can almost sound like they're speaking different languages.
OK!
It's my time to shine!
I've said both these things!
As @hamstergeddon put it so colourfully, it is purely playful teasing and banter.
American accents, Australian Accents, Indian Accents, I playfully mock them all. At least that is the intent.
With Indians, if an American is listening, I usually ask if the Indian if they prefer American English, or proper english. The question is directed towards the American. (If you have a strong American accent, you are the American.) If it's just me and an especially friendly Indian, then I simply inquire if they are a veggie.
I'm an American-Australian dual citizen. I don't know all that much about British English, but Australian English has a lot in common with it, so I'll just talk about Australian English.
I haven't found anything inherently better about one or the other ā people seem to be equally capable of self-expression no matter which dialect they speak ā but there are a few things I personally prefer about one versus the other.
For example, I really dislike that Australians adopted the word "chips" from both the US and England, so both fries and crisps are called chips here. Likewise, I really dislike that Americans shorten "gasoline" to "gas"; "petrol" is so much clearer.
I prefer Celsius to Fahrenheit. Even though I grew up with Fahrenheit, I took to Celsius immediately and find it much more human-readable for both weather and cooking.
On the other, I just really like feet. A foot is such a handy middle sizes between inches/centimeters and yards/meters. And as a hobbyist woodworker, I like that a foot divides into twelve inches. Base-10 may be better for arithmetic division, but base-12 is better for physical crafts, where you often want to divide things into thirds or quarters. (But once we get below inches, I'm definitely in the pro-millimeter camp! And yes, this means I absolutely do use both inches and centimeters in my projects. They're more interoperable than you'd expect, with 1 inch being 2.5 centimeters ā close enough for woodworking, anyway.)
Iām American, but I just really like the word āaluminiumā. āBootā and ābonnetā as well. I grew up watching top gear, ha.
I do still watch a number of British shows and I do like British English in that itās just more fun for certain words and phrases, but maybe a Brit that watches American shows would say try same.
I like the word "dodgy". I think it made its way onto Separated By A Common Language's best-of list one year.
or as I call it, English (Traditional) and English (Simplified)
English in England was the original english, but current English accents have also shifted significantly with time. Your contacts might be conflating original with real, but they are ignoring how languages change.
Define "better".