How Did American English Become Distinctly American?

 

[In the longer version of the conversation transcribed below, News Hour correspondent Judy Woodruff observes, “Language is not something we all spend a lot of time talking about.  We kind of take it for granted—it’s just how we communicate, it’s what we engage in every day.” 

[Then she asks her two interview subjects, “How much is English, is our language part of our identity?”

[Responds Valerie Fridland of the University of Nevada, “Language is a repository of our culture, our identity, and of our knowledge.”  Anne Curzan, University of Michigan, adds, “Language is so powerful.  It is core to our identity . . . .” 

[Curzan continues, “It is also one of our most powerful tools as humans to hurt people and heal, and include and exclude.  It is a very, very powerful part of human society.”

[That’s what this podcast is about at bottom.  It’s why, aside from the fact that I’m fascinated with language (as even casual readers of Rick On Theater will know from the frequent appearances of language-related posts on this blog), that I’m posting the abbreviated version of this transcript.

[(I had contemplated posting the full version of the podcast, but this version, from the regular News Hour broadcast, is only about four minutes long, while the full podcast, a link to which is provided below, is 40 minutes and there’s no online transcript I can use.  I can recommend that anyone interested in this topic give it a listen.)

[As PBS transcripts are hybrid human/machine-made, and can include mistranscriptions occasionally, I’ve edited this one slightly.]

“HOW AMERICAN ENGLISH EVOLVED FROM ITS BRITISH ROOTS”
by Judy Woodruff 

[The segment transcribed below aired on the PBS News Hour of 6 August 2026.  It’s posted on the website for Channel 13 (WNET, the PBS outlet in New York City).]

How did American English become so distinctly American? On her “In Pursuit of Happiness” podcast, Judy Woodruff sat down with linguists Anne Curzan and Valerie Fridland. They look at how Americans from the very beginning reshaped the English language by changing pronunciations and spellings, creating new words and evolving dialects.

[In Pursuit of Happiness with Judy Woodruff is a limited six-episode series of podcasts, aired in the summer of 2026 as the United States celebrates its 250th anniversary. Woodruff explores the stories behind the milestones of American history and looks at some of the culture, places, and ideas that have defined us.]

GEOFF BENNETT [Co-anchor of “PBS News Hour”]: Finally, tonight: How did American English become so distinctly American?

AMNA NAWAZ [Co-anchor of “PBS News Hour”]: Judy Woodruff explores that question and others in this week’s “In Pursuit of Happiness” podcast with two linguists, Anne Curzan [b. ca. 1970] and Valerie Fridland [b. ca. 1969].

JUDY WOODRUFF: I want to ask the two of you to take us back to that period and even before, Anne, and remind us what was it about the English language at the time of the Declaration, and even before, that was – it was beginning to be different from British, or was it?

Was it all sounding British?

ANNE CURZAN, Linguist, University of Michigan: It’s such a great question.

And I think that, when we look at the language of 1776, it can look really familiar because we can read the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution and understand them.

And so sometimes I will hear, well, English really hasn’t changed since then.

And I say, oh, yes, it has.

And you can find all these things in the Declaration of Independence, for example, like a ‘hath’ instead of a ‘has.’

And that’s – there’s a reason when you study the history of English for that, or there’s a reason that the spelling actually still looks British in the Declaration of Independence, because we had not yet had this American reform of spelling, which we can talk about.

So I’m going to let Valerie talk a little bit about sort of the sounds of the language in terms of what was happening in the United States as English had been brought to North America and where – and it’s really important for people to remember how many languages were already being spoken in North America.

So you have hundreds of Native American languages, along with French and Dutch and Spanish, all of these languages being spoken in the U.S. as English arrives, and that’s really important for understanding what happens to English as different settlers from different parts of England and then Scotland and Ireland come to the United States.

So, with that, Valerie, I have set you up . . .

JUDY WOODRUFF: Yes.

ANNE CURZAN: . . . to talk a little bit more about the sound.

JUDY WOODRUFF: It is astonishing to hear you say hundreds of Native American languages.

But fill this out for us, Valerie.

How were we sounding back then?

VALERIE FRIDLAND, Professor of Sociolinguistics, University of Nevada, Reno: I get asked a lot, what would we have sounded like at the time of the revolution?

[Sociolinguistics is the study of how language is shaped by and used differently within any given social group.]

Would we have still sounded British?

That’s actually a question that people want to know a lot.

And there are – it’s – obviously, we didn’t have iPhones back then.

It would have been super helpful, but we did have people that wrote more like they spoke.

So we do have some misspellings, particularly in the colonial period, that give us hints as to how people sounded.

We also had, as Anne referenced, a period of spelling reform following the revolution [late 1780s-1828] that was both part of this simplified spelling movement, which was English doesn’t look like how it sounds, and can we make that less complicated?

Noah Webster [1758-1843; American lexicographer, textbook pioneer, English-language spelling reformer, political writer, editor, and author] was part of that.

So was Benjamin Franklin [1706-90; a Founding Father of the United States; American polymath; a drafter and signer of the Declaration of Independence; first U.S. Postmaster General: 1775-76].

But, also, can we make American English different from British English in part by changing the way it is spelled?

So someone like Benjamin Franklin is very helpful for telling us how people sounded at that era because he actually made a phonetic alphabet . . .

VALERIE FRIDLAND: . . . to represent things as they were spoken and wrote that way, until he kind of gave it up, realizing that no one else was going to jump on his bandwagon.

But there were three main periods in how we sounded, and one would have been the very early colonial period, where it would have been very British for the British settlers, but also you had, as Anne referenced, a lot of other settlers.

But the basic answer is, yes, at the time of the revolution, it probably would have sounded more British than American to us.

There probably wasn’t that big of a difference between the way that a lot of Southern British people spoke in the way they did in, for example, Philadelphia or Boston at that time.

But it would have sounded very different from both modern British speech and modern American speech, because many of the vowels were in flux at the time, and some of the consonant differences that we have now, like the way we flap the T to make it more D-like in words like ‘water’ or ‘bottle,’ would not have yet happened.

So it would have been quite different from speech in either place today.

AMNA NAWAZ: And you can watch this full conversation and all episodes of “Pursuit of Happiness” on our YouTube page or wherever you get your podcasts.

*  *  *  *
“HOW POP CULTURE AND SOCIAL MEDIA
ARE CHANGING HOW PEOPLE TALK”

[The segment transcribed above, “How American English evolved from its British roots,” aired on Thursday, 6 August.  On the following Monday, the 10th, News Hour broadcast another small excerpt from the sixth podcast in Woodruff’s In Pursuit of Happiness series.  I decided to append it to my post, even though it’s little inside-baseball and likely to be of less interest to someone who’s not into languages or, more specifically, linguistics. 

[(It will probably surprise no one who’s read more than a couple of ROT posts that I took a course in linguistics in college.  Paid off in spades for me, too.  But that story’s irrelevant here, though I’ve told it on the blog before (see “Dodging Vietnam” in “Short Takes IV” [22 February 2013] or “Berlin Memoir, Part 1” [16 December 2016]).]

GEOFF BENNETT: Well, over the past few weeks, our Judy Woodruff has been speaking to a host of experts about the country’s 250th anniversary for her “In Pursuit of Happiness” podcast.

That includes conversations about the role satire, national parks, and music have played in our history, as well as the latest episode looking at how American English has evolved.

As it turns out, there’s more than one way that the English language reveals a lot about the way we speak.

VALERIE FRIDLAND: I think a really accessible example of how these kind of intrinsic tendencies we have towards change is in the way that we pronounce ‘butter.’

So, if you’re a British – southern British English speaker, a standard Southern British English speaker, you will say something like but-ta.

(LAUGHTER)

VALERIE FRIDLAND: If you’re an American, you will say BUD-der.

And there’s a natural tendency in language when you have an unstressed syllable because it doesn’t get as much attention and love, for things to reduce, for sounds to reduce.

And so in British English, especially southern British English, you drop the R. But in American English, we kept the R. So we didn’t do that to reduce.

Instead, we reduced with the T. But they start to be imbued with social meaning, so that if you say but-ta, you’re standard southern British.

If you say BUD-der, you’re American.

And so you see a difference between social status in Britain, where it’s not geographic distance, but it’s social distance.

And then you see geographic distance that separated people, leading to the difference between the but-ta and the BUD-der pronunciation.

JUDY WOODRUFF: You know, I’m listening to the two of you.

I have so many, so many other questions, and I’m thinking about how much Americans move around now.

You may be born in the North, but you move to the South, and vice versa, born in the East, move to the West.

Of course, media, movies, television, radio, listening to other voices, what kinds of – how has all that, and especially the media, the presence of the media, begun to change, or has it changed, or is it changing how people talk?

ANNE CURZAN: There are the changes and things that people really notice.

So, new slang comes out and everybody wants to talk about ‘six, seven’ or ‘rizz’ or what – these sorts of things.

But one of the things that I study is the more subtle changes that are still happening that tend to go below the radar.

So they’re the sorts of vowel changes that I was talking about.

But, for example, I think some people have noticed that the word ‘shall’ is not healthy.

It is dying out of the language.

What many people have not noticed is that the word ‘must,’ in the sense of obligation, like ‘I must run errands’ – and you can you can hear I do it very seriously, ‘I must run errands.’

Because what I would tend to say is, ‘I have to run errands’ or ‘I need to run errands.’

JUDY WOODRUFF: Or ‘I need to run errands.’

ANNE CURZAN: So ‘have to’ and ‘need to’ are replacing ‘must’ in this sense of obligation.

These – if you hang out with young people, as Fridland does as well, that ‘on accident’ is coming into the language, and ‘by accident’ is moving out of the language.

Like, we’re getting a prepositional shift there.

GEOFF BENNETT: All six episodes of “In Pursuit of Happiness” are out now.

You can watch them on our PBS News YouTube page or wherever you get your podcasts.