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The Fall of the Empire: The Americanization of English

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The Fall of the Empire: The Americanization of English

Bruno Gonçalves 1,† , Lucı́a Loureiro-Porto2 , José J. Ramasco3 , David Sánchez3
1 Center for Data Science, New York University, 60 5th Avenue, New York, NY
10012, USA
2 Departament de Filologia Espanyola, Moderna i Clàssica, Universitat de les Illes
Balears (UIB), 07122 Palma de Mallorca, Spain
3 Instituto de Fı́sica Interdisciplinar y Sistemas Complejos IFISC (CSIC-UIB),
07122 Palma de Mallorca, Spain
arXiv:1707.00781v1 [cs.CL] 3 Jul 2017

† E-mail: [email protected]

Abstract
As global political preeminence gradually shifted from the United Kingdom to the United
States, so did the capacity to culturally influence the rest of the world. In this work, we
analyze how the world-wide varieties of written English are evolving. We study both the
spatial and temporal variations of vocabulary and spelling of English using a large corpus
of geolocated tweets and the Google Books datasets corresponding to books published in
the US and the UK. The advantage of our approach is that we can address both standard
written language (Google Books) and the more colloquial forms of microblogging messages
(Twitter). We find that American English is the dominant form of English outside the UK
and that its influence is felt even within the UK borders. Finally, we analyze how this trend
has evolved over time and the impact that some cultural events have had in shaping it.

1 Introduction
With roots dating as far back as Cabot’s explorations in the 15th century and the 1584 estab-
lishment of the ill-fated Roanoke colony in the New World, the British empire was one of the
largest empires in Human History. At its zenith, it extended from North America to Asia, Africa
and Australia deserving the moniker “the empire where the sun never sets”. However, as history
has shown countless times, empires rise and fall due to a complex set of internal and external
forces. In the case of the British empire, its preeminence faded as the United States of America
–one of its first colonies– took over the dominant role in the global arena.
As an empire spreads so does the language of its ruling class. Thanks to both its global
extension, late demise, and the rise of the US as a global actor, the English language enjoys
an undisputed role as the global lingua franca serving as the default language of science, com-
merce and diplomacy [1, 2] (see Fig. 1). Given such an extended presence, it is only natural
that English would absorb words, expressions and other features of local indigenous languages
resulting in dozens of dialects and topolects (language forms typical of a specific area) such as
“Singlish” (Singapore), “Hinglish” (India), Kenyan English [3], and, most importantly, American
English [4] a variety that includes within itself several other dialects [5, 6].
The transfer of political, economical and cultural power from Great Britain to the United
States has progressed gradually over the course of more than half a century, with World War
II being the final stepping stone in the establishment of American supremacy. The cultural rise
of the United States also implied the exportation of their specific form of English resulting in a
change of how English is written and spoken around the world. In fact, the “Americanization” of
 2

(global) English is one of the main processes of language change in contemporary English [7]. As
an example, if we focus on spelling, some the original differences between British and American
English orthography (most of which are the result of Webster’s reform [8]) are somehow blurred
and, for instance, the tendency for verbs and nouns to end in h-izei and h-izationi in America is
now common on both sides of the Atlantic [9]. Likewise, a tendency for Postcolonial varieties of
English in South-East Asia to prefer American spelling over the British one has been observed,
at least, for Nigerian English [10], Singapore and Trinidad and Tobago [11], regarding spelling
and lexis, for Indian English [12] and Bahamas [13], regarding syntax, and for Hong Kong [14],
regarding phonology. In addition, a growing tendency for Americanization has been observed for
Philippine English, which, despite being rooted in American English, has experienced a rise in the
frequency of American forms [15]. Although this Americanization is found in different registers,
web genres have been highlighted as a text-type where American forms are preferred [16].
Electronic communication has indeed been considered to play a role in linguistic uniformity [17].
It is in this sense that this paper will make a contribution to the study of the Americanization
of English, since a corpus of 213, 086, 831 geolocated tweets will be used to study the spread
of American English spelling and vocabulary throughout the globe, including regions where
English is used as a first, second and foreign language.
The study of diatopic variation using Twitter datasets is a relatively new subject [18]. The
use of geotagged microblogging data [19] allows to quantitatively examine linguistic patterns
on a worldwide scale, in automatic fashion and within conversational situations. The global
extension and the real time availability of the data constitute major methodological advantages
over more traditional approaches like surveys and interviews [20]. Importantly, the resulting
corpora are publicly available [21], although due to their nature most of the literature has been
concerned with lexical variation (for an exception that addresses semantic and syntactic vari-
ation, see Ref. [22]). Thus, different variables can be mapped after carefully removing lexical
ambiguities [23]. A Bayesian approach shows good agreement between baseline queries and sur-
vey responses [24]. Machine learning techniques applied to Twitter corpora reveal the existence
of superdialects [25,26], which can be further analyzed with dialectometric techniques [27]. Lin-
guistic evolution in social media appears to be strongly connected to demographics [28]. Age and
gender issues can be additionally introduced in the analysis [29]. Moreover, an investigation of
lexical alternations unveils hierarchical dialect regions in the United States [30]. Twitter can be
also employed in the study of specific varieties departing from the standard form [31]. However,
online social media are more suitable for a synchronic approximation to language variation. If
one aims at understanding the diachronic evolution of language, we need a corpus well estab-
lished over time. This is available with the Google Books database [32], which has already been
used for the analysis of relative frequencies that characterize word fluxes [33, 34] or the appli-
cability of Zip’s and Heaps’s law with different scaling regimes [35]. Here, we will complement
our Twitter study of the Americanization of English with an analysis of the dynamical process
that is taking place since 1800.
In this paper we analyze how English is used around the world, in informal contexts, using a
large scale Twitter dataset. Due to the written nature of our corpus we consider in detail both
how vocabulary and spelling of common words varies from place to place in order to understand
how American cultural influence is spreading around the world. We complement this synchronic
analysis with a diachronic view of how the prevalence of British and American vocabulary and
 3

spelling have evolved over time in British and American publications using the Google Books
dataset.

2 Methods
Datasets

Figure 1. English tweets A heatmap showing the location of geolocated English tweets in
our dataset that match our keywords.

The goal of this manuscript is to analyze how English is used across both time and space. We
study the geographical variation of English by using the Twitter Decahose from which we collect
[36] all tweets written in English between May 10, 2010 and Feb 28, 2016 that contain geolocation
information. The language is detected using Chromium Compact Language Detection library
as in Ref. [36]. The tweets are then mapped to a grid of cells of 0.25◦ × 0.25◦ spanning the
globe and resulting in 30, 898, 072 tweets matching our list of words. A heatmap illustrating the
geographical distribution of matching tweets is shown in Fig. 1. Out of the general dataset we
further select those tweets with spelling and vocabulary features that allow us to discern the
variety of English used (see below for a detailed description).
The temporal evolution of English is analyzed using the Google Books dataset [32] of books
published by both British and American publishers. The dataset contains the number of times
individual words were used in books scanned by Google and dating back to the 15th century.
However, due to the poor statistics in earlier periods, we restrict our analysis to the period
between 1800 and 2010. Both data sources are different in nature: Twitter contains more
colloquial expressions, while the language recorded in the books is more formal. As a result,
these two sources, in combination, can provide a useful perspective on the spatio-temporal
patterns developed or developing in English.
 4

Metrics
The polarization, Vwc , for a concept w in cell c during the data collection period is defined as
the ratio:
Ac − Bw c
Vwc = w , (1)
Acw + Bwc

where Acw (Bw c ) is the number of American (British) forms of the concept w observed in cell

c. The polarization is then constrained to be in the [−1, 1] domain, with −1 corresponding to

purely British and 1 being purely American forms.
The polarization of each cell, V c , is then determined by taking the average polarization over
all words observed in cell c:
Vc
P
V = w cw,
c
(2)
W
where W c is the number of different words observed in cell c. Similarly, the polarization score
of a country is defined as the average polarization taken over all the cells within that country.
By considering the average polarization we are able to compare countries of varying sizes.
In the case of Twitter, the polarization signal is measured over the complete time period
of the database since, as it is not long enough to allow for large variations in the language use
patterns. On the other hand, when the time evolution of written language is considered with
Google Books the space is not relevant, beyond the country of origin of the published book, and
we add an index referring to the year y considered. The polarization V y is then defined as:

Vwy
P
y
V = wy , (3)
W
where Vwy is the concept polarization for year y and W y refers to all the books published in the
country considered, the US or the UK, during year y.

3 Results
In our analysis, we consider two factors of differentiation between American and British English:
Spelling and Vocabulary with different word lists used for each case. The complete list of words
and expression used in each case can be found in the online supplementary material. It is
the result of compiling information in reference books [9] and online sources such as the Oxford
Dictionaries1 . The words in the list were subsequently checked in two widely-used representative
corpora of British and American English [37, 38]. Only pairs of words in which one of the
members exhibits a significantly higher frequency in either of the two varieties were considered
for inclusion in the list. Inflectional forms (e.g., solicitor, solicitors, solicitor’s, solicitors’ ) as
well as derived (e.g., amphitheater ) and compound forms were also included in the search (e.g.,
sportscenter ).
Let us start by considering how the Vocabulary used for common terms such as lorry/truck or
motorway/freeway changes around the world by defining the ratio of each cell as described above.
The results are plotted in Fig 2. Unsurprisingly, we find that the British Islands are tendentially
1
https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/usage/british-and-american-terms
 5

Figure 2. Vocabulary The polarization ratio of each cell around the world according to the
vocabulary used within each cell. The inset barplot is an histogram of the number of cells as a
function of the ratio.

blue while the United States is predominantly red as befits the representatives of each trend.
Interestingly, Western Europe where English teaching has traditionally followed British norms
the American influence is undeniable. Most areas are depicted in various shades of red while
some of the largest international metropolises such as Madrid, Paris, Amsterdam, Berlin, Milan
or Rome are visible in light shades, in no doubt due to their role as touristic and transportation
hubs, see Fig. 3(left). A more marked British influence is easily seen in former colonies (see also
Fig. 5) such as South Africa, Australia, New Zealand (“the only large areas in the Southern
hemisphere where English is spoken as a native language” [9], and which have reached a very
advanced phase of development, according to Schneider’s 2007 Dynamic Model [39]) or India
(where English is spoken as a non-native language, but which has followed an exonormative
model, i.e., strongly based in the British rules [40]) displaying large areas of blue side by side
with tell tale patches of white in the most international areas such as Pretoria, Melbourne,
Sidney, Auckland, New Delhi or Mumbai. Furthermore, countries such as the Philippines (one
of the few Postcolonial varieties of English with an American superstratum [39]), as well as
Taiwan, South Korea and Japan (where English is spoken as a second language) attest their
strong American influence with full displays of red.
Regarding Spelling, the case for American influence becomes even stronger as displayed in
Fig. 4. The British Isles attain significantly lighter shades of blue as do the former British colonies
with South Africa, Australia and New Zealand becoming predominately red. This dichotomy
between spelling and vocabulary, illustrated in Fig. 3 for Europe, is perhaps a testament to the
conflicting forces of traditional formal education and media influence. Individuals who studied in
school systems that subscribe to the British form of English are more prone to continue writing
words in the way they originally learned them. However, through the influence of American
 6

Figure 3. Europe Side by side comparison of the Vocabulary (left) and Spelling (right)
results for countries in continental Europe. The tension between British spelling and American
vocabulary is clearly visible by the shift towards lighter shades of blue and darker shades of
red between the left and the right plots.

dominated television and film industries they have acquired new (American) vocabulary. This
can be clearly seen in Fig. 5 where we plot the average polarization for both Vocabulary and
Spelling for 30 countries around the world, including countries belonging to Kachru’s [41] inner
circle, i.e., where English is spoken as a native language (e.g., UK, Ireland), outer circle, i.e.,
where English is spoken as a second language (e.g., India, South Africa) and the expanding circle,
i.e., where English is spoken as a foreign language (e.g., Portugal, Finland, Russia). Interestingly
enough, in all expanding circle territories the American orthography and vocabulary dominate,
and the same happens, obviously, in the United States and in the Philippines, a former American
colony. The bottom part of the figure includes inner and outer circle varieties, where American
vocabulary is also chosen over British forms, with the notable exception of India, UK and
Ireland, whose green bars are always towards the left hand (British) side of the ratio spectrum.
India’s alignment with the UK is clearly the result of an exonormative model and postcolonial
prescriptivism in this former colony of the United Kingdom [40, 42]. Surprisingly, we find that
in some ex-colonies which still hold strong ties with the British empire, such as South Africa,
Australia and New Zealand, the drift towards American vocabulary is unmistakable.
We now consider a temporal view of how English as a language is evolving. Using the word
counts provided by the Google Books digitalization efforts, we measure the Vocabulary and
 7

Figure 4. Spelling The polarization of each cell around the world according to the spelling
used within each cell. The inset barplot is an histogram of the number of cells as a function of
the ratio observed.

Spelling average ratio per year for books published by American and British publishing houses.
An analysis of the resulting timelines as shown in Fig. 6 provides several interesting insights.
First, we can see that the divergence in spelling between the American and British forms has
significantly increased in the last 200 years. Indeed, from this time series we can pinpoint the
beginning of the trend to around 1828 when Noah Webster published An American Dictionary
of the English Language [43] with the explicit goal of systematizing the way in which English
was written in America. As [44] puts it: “He is certainly responsible for establishing (though
not inventing) the common differences between traditional British and American spellings” the
final -or versus -our in color, labor, savor, and the like; -er versus French -re in theater, center,
meter ; and the simplification of final -ck as in physic, music, logic. This is now considered to
have been the first American-English dictionary and it started the Merriam-Webster series of
Dictionaries that is still dominant today. The US vocabulary curve follows a similar but less
pronounced trend as it takes longer for new words to be created than for people to agree on a
common spelling form.
Another interesting feature of these timelines is the pronounced “Britishization” of American
English in the years following World War II as seen by the declining slope that extends until
after 1960. This can likely be explained by the large influx of European migrants that moved to
America in search of a better life away from a destroyed or warring Europe. In the immediate
aftermath of WWII congress passed the War Brides Act in 1946 and the Displaced Persons Act
in 1948 to facilitate the immigration to the US by the people affected by the war. It is estimated
that between 1941 and 1950 over 1 Million people [45], mostly of European descent, immigrated
to the United States that at the time had a population of 150 million. In the following decade,
this number doubled to over 2 Million [46].
 8

United States Spelling

Mexico Vocabulary

Philippines
Brazil
Portugal
South Korea
Japan
Russia
Spain
Thailand
China
Indonesia
Turkey
Italy
Germany
Denmark
Netherlands
Sweden
Finland
Switzerland
Belgium
France
Greece
Canada
India
South Africa
Australia
New Zealand
United Kingdom
Ireland

−1.0 −0.5 0.0 0.5 1.0

Br Polarization Am

Figure 5. Vocabulary and Spelling polarization ratio by country

Interestingly, while the ratio timelines within the United Kingdom had been towards becom-
ing ever more British, we find a significant change of trend in the last 20 years of our dataset,
corresponding to the period after the fall of the Berlin wall and the end of the Cold War that
left America as the world’s only superpower. It is the status quo resulting from the aftermath
of this trend that we are able to observe in the Twitter analysis above.

4 Conclusions
The way in which languages evolve in time and change from place to place has long been the
focus of much interest in the linguistic community. With the advent of new and extensive corpora
derived from large scale online datasets we are now able to take on a more quantitative approach
to tackling this fundamental question. In this work we analyze two datasets that, when taken
together, are able to provide a bird’s eye view of the way English usage has been changing over
time and in different countries.
The picture we are able to paint is particularly stark. The past two centuries have clearly
resulted in a clear shift in vocabulary and spelling conventions from British to American. This
 9

1.0
First American Dictionary

WWII
Spelling UK
0.8 Spelling US
Vocabulary UK
0.6 Vocabulary US

American
0.4
Polarization

0.2
0.0
-0.2
-0.4

British
-0.6
-0.8
-1.0
1800 1820 1840 1860 1880 1900 1920 1940 1960 1980 2000
Year

Figure 6. The Americanization of English over time Averaged polarization ratio of

Vocabulary and Spelling for books published by US and UK publishing companies in the
1800 − 2010 period.

trend is especially visible in the decades following WWII and the fall of Berlin Wall. Indeed,
when we consider the current status quo as seen through the lens of Twitter, it becomes clear
that only in the countries where British influence has been strongest, such as ex-colonies with a
strong exonormative influence (in Schneider’s terms [39]), are British conventions still dominant
to some degree.
It should be noted that both datasets we utilize in our analysis are intrinsically biased.
Books are typically written by cultural elites. Also, despite their increasing democratization,
GPS enabled mobile devices are, in many countries, only available to middle and higher economic
strata. As a result, there are certainly factors of linguistic evolution we are missing but the fact
that both datasets agree on the general picture means that we are able to capture, at the very
least, the underlying trends.
 10

5 Acknowledgments
BG thanks the Moore and Sloan Foundations for support as part of the Moore-Sloan Data Sci-
ence Environment at NYU. LL-P thanks the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness
for funding under the grants FFI2014-53930-P and FFI2014-51873-REDT.

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 13

A Word Lists
Vocabulary

British American
railway railroad
MA dissertation, MA dissertations MA thesis, MA theses
doctoral thesis, doctoral theses doctoral dissertation, doctoral dissertations
draughts checkers
abseil, abseils, abseiled, abseiling rappel, rappels, rappelled, rappeled, rappelling,
rappeling
antenatal prenatal
anticlockwise counterclockwise
aubergine, aubergines, aubergine’s, aubergines’ eggplant, eggplants, eggplant’s, eggplants’
barrister, barristers, barrister’s, barristers’, so- attorney, attorneys, attorney’s, attorneys’
licitor, solicitors, solicitor’s, solicitors’
biscuit, biscuits, biscuit’s, biscuits’ cookie, cookies, cookie’s, cookies’
car park, car parks, car park’s, car parks’ parking lot, parking lots, parking lot’s, parking
lots’
caster sugar, icing sugar confectioner’s sugar, powdered sugar
corn flour corn starch
cupboard, cupboards, cupboard’s, cupboards’ closet, closets, closet’s, closets’
demister defroster
drawing pin, drawing pins, drawing pin’s, draw- thumbtack, thumbtacks, thumbtack’s, thumb-
ing pins’ tacks’
Father Christmas Santa Claus
handbrake, hand brake emergency brake
hire purchase installment plan
inside leg inseam
mobile phone, mobile phones, mobile phone’s, cell phone, cell phones, cell phone’s, cell phones’
mobile phones’
motorway, motoways, motorway’s, motorways’ expressway, expressways, expressway’s, express-
ways’, freeway, freeways, freeway’s, freeways’
nappy, nappies, nappy’s, nappies’ diaper, diapers, diaper’s, diapers’
notice board, notice boards, notice board’s, no- bulletin board, bulletin boards, bulletin board’s,
tice boards’ bulletin boards’
number plate, number plates, number plate’s, license plate, license plates, license plate’s, li-
number plates’ cense plates’
plasterboard, plasterboards, plasterboard’s, Wallboard, wallboards, wallboard’s, wallboards’
plasterboards’
polystyrene styrofoam
porridge oatmeal
 14

perspex plexiglass
Pushchair, pushchairs, pushchair’s, pushchairs’ Stroller, strollers, stroller’s, strollers’
rubbish garbage
skirting board baseboard
spring onion, spring onions, spring onion’s, green onion, green onions, green onion’s, green
spring onions’ onions’
sticky tape scotch tape
sweets candy
torch, torches flashlight, flashlights
tracksuit, tracksuits, tracksuit’s, tracksuits’ sweatsuit, sweatsuits, sweatsuit’s, sweatsuits’
trousers pants
valuer, valuers, valuer’s, valuers’ appraiser, appraisers, appraiser’s, appraisers’
wellington boots, wellingtons rubbers, rubber boots, rain boots
windscreen, windscreens, windscreen’s, wind- windshield, windshields, windshield’s, wind-
screens’ shields’
lorry, lorries, lorry’s, lorries truck, trucks, truck’s, trucks’
chemist’s drug store, drug stores
elastic band, elastic bands, elastic band’s, elastic rubber band, rubber bands, rubber band’s, rub-
bands’ ber bands’
estate agent, estate agents, estate agent’s, estate realtor, realtors, realtor’s, realtors’
agents’
cot, cots crib, cribs
off-licence liquor store
crayfish crawfish
capsicum bell pepper

Table 1. Vocabulary word list

Spelling

British American
skilful skillful
wilful willful
fulfil, fulfils fulfill, fulfills
instil, instils instill, instills
appal, appals appall, appalls
flavour, flavours, flavour’s, flavours’ flavor, flavors, flavor’s, flavors’
mould, moulds, mould’s, moulds’ mold, molds, mold’s, molds’
moult, moults, moulted, moulting molt, molts, molted, molting
smoulder, smoulders, smouldered, smouldering smolder, smolders, smoldered, smoldering
moustache, moustaches, moustache’s, mous- mustache, mustaches, mustache’s, mustaches’
taches’
 15

centre, centres, centre’s, centres’ center, centers, center’s, centers’

metre, metres, metre’s, metres’ meter, meters, meter’s, meters’
theatre, theatres, theatre’s, theatres’ theater, theaters, theater’s, theaters’
analyse, analyses, analysed, analysing analyze, analyzes, analyzed, analyzing
paralyse, paralyses, paralysed, paralysing paralyze, paralyzes, paralyzed, paralyzing
defence defense
offence offense
pretence pretense
revelling, revelled reveling, reveled
travelled, travelling traveled, traveling
traveller, travellers, traveller’s, travellers’ traveler, travelers, traveler’s, travelers’
marvellous marvelous
plough, ploughs, ploughed, ploughing plow, plows, plowed, plowing
aluminium, aluminium’s aluminum, aluminum’s
jewellery, jewellery’s jewelry, jewelry’s
pyjamas pajamas
whisky, whisky’s whiskey, whiskey’s
neighbour* neigbor*
*honour* *honor*
*colour* *color*
*behaviour* *behavior*
*labour* *labor*
humour* humor*
*favour* *favor*
harbour* harbor*
tumour* tumor*
vigour* vigor*
rumour* rumor*
rigour* rigor*
*demeanour* *demeanor*
clamour* clamor*
odour* odor*
armour* armor*
endeavour* endeavor*
parlour* parlor*
vapour* vapor*
saviour* savior*
splendour* splendor*
fervour* fervor*
savour* savor*
valour* valor*
 16

candour* candor*
ardour* ardor*
rancour* rancor*
succour* succor*
arbour* arbor*
catalogue* catalog*
analog* analog*
acknowledgement* acknowledgment*
goitre goiter
foetus fetus
paediatrician pediatrician
oesophagus esophagus
manoeuvr* maneuver*
oestrogen estrogen
anaemia anemia

Table 2. Spelling word list

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