The Americanisation of spoken British English: A corpus-based study of the diachronic and synchronic Americanisation of lexis in spoken British English

Abstract

This thesis presents a twofold investigation of the use of Americanisms in the lexis of spoken British English where both the diachronic and synchronic aspect of Americanisation is examined. Previous research has noted an influence of American English on other varieties of English, but few of them have studied the variety of British English. The aim of this thesis is to find out 1) whether there has been an increase in Americanisms in the lexis of conversational British English in the last twenty years, 2) whether the demographic variables of age, gender and class have an effect on the use of Americanisms, and 3) if there are differences between semantic domains. The study is corpus-based, using the British National Corpus 1994 (BNC1994) and the Spoken British National Corpus 2014 (Spoken BNC2014) to investigate the frequency of a selection of American English items. This study demonstrates that British English indeed shows signs of increased Americanisation over the last two decades. The analysis also shows that age, gender and class seem to have an effect on the use of Americanisms. Generally speaking, it is men, speakers aged 0–29 and speakers belonging to classes C2, D and E that reveal the highest frequency of American English items in their spoken language. Furthermore, findings reveal that the semantic categories ‘Housing and Household’, ‘Food and cooking’ and ‘Transport’ exhibit the highest frequencies of Americanisms, both diachronically and synchronically. There are several possible reasons for the Americanisation of spoken British English. In short, it is the continuing influence of the US on culture and media that maintains the influx of American English items into other varieties of English, including British English.