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Part 6
TERRITORIAL VARIETIES OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE
UNIT 1. ENGLISH IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
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1. Introduction
British and American English are the main variants of the English language.
Besides them there are Canadian, Australian, New Zealand, Indian, South African,
Jamaican and others. They all have their peculiarities in pronunciation, grammar and
vocabulary, but they are easily used for communication and understood by people
living in these countries.
For a long time linguists argued if we should consider American English a
dialect or a separate language. The theory that American English is a dialect can
hardly be accepted because the use of a dialect is usually limited to a certain locality
only, whereas American English is spoken by a huge number of people all over one
of the biggest countries in the world. Besides, any dialect is always opposed to the
literary variety of the language: a dialect is a deviation from the standard language, so
it is natural that it cannot have its own literary standard. This is not applicable to
American English, because it possesses a literary standard of its own. The hypothesis
of the so-called „American language‟ used to have several supporters, mainly in the
United States, but it is very debatable too: a language is supposed to possess a
vocabulary, as well as phonetic and grammatical systems of its own. This is not
applicable to American English. That is why scholars prefer to label American
English a „regional variety‟, a „territorial variety‟ or a „variant‟ of the English
language.
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