20 Maps That Show How Americans Speak English Totally Differently From One Another

"One of the things that make the United States special is its diverse and varied linguistic background. You might think people speak the same English you and I know, but no. The number of different accents spoken in the US and the degree of lexical variation is just fascinating. Language variation is probably one of the most exciting stuff that linguists concern themselves with. One of these is Joshua Katz, a Ph.D. student of statistics at North Carolina State University, who took on the job of mapping the linguistic variation of the US and published them in a book he titled Speaking American. Here are some of the coolest maps from his collection."

https://ahtaitay.blogspot.com/2020/07/20-maps-that-show-how-americans-speak.html

Try Meet, Speak & Learn's Interactive Tool for Learning English Language Quantifiers!

Why is English Spelling so Damn Weird?

Adjectives: What Planets and Noun Phrases Have in Common

The Planetary Accretion Metaphor of Adjectival Layering

Linguists have long studied the proper ordering of adjectives. There is a universal hierarchy of adjective ordering that encompasses all natural languages spoken by humans. There are also exceptions to the universal hierarchy in all languages. There appear to be several forces that apply order on adjectives. Sometimes these forces work together and sometimes they work in opposition to one another. This makes it difficult to enumerate any universal ordering rule.

One hypothesized factor includes the structure of the human brain itself. The human brain appears to prefer the presentation of information that is ordered in specific ways. This would help to explain why the phenomenon is highly consistent across unrelated natural languages spoken by humans. The human brain's organization imposes a preference.

Another factor that appears to be more than an hypothesis is that adjectival order is influenced by the relative importance of various nominal attributes. For example, when comparing wines, the origin of the wine is considered more essential to the nature of the wine than an opinion about the quality of the wine. One says "a fine Sardinian wine" and not "a Sardinian fine wine". Whether a wine is fine or not is often a matter of taste or opinion. Its fineness is a subjective - not an objective quality of the wine. The fact that it is a Sardinian wine is not disputable. Whether it is a fine wine or not is up for dispute and might say more about whoever utters the phrase "fine Sardinian wine" than the wine itself. In a sense, this is a matter of epistemology - the study of knowledge and knowledge about things. The origin of something can be known. The quality of something can only be believed. If we think of the epistemological weight of an adjective upon its noun on a spectrum with belief at one end and knowledge at the other end, we can see something analogous to gravity exerting a force of attraction between the noun and its adjectives. This "gravity" plays a role in the ordering of adjectives in a way similar to how a planetary body accretes into a sphere with the heavier elements towards its center and the lighter elements towards the edge of its atmosphere - heavy metals in the center, lighter metals in the outer core, molten rock in its mantle, lighter rock in its crust, water above the crust, air above the water, etc. If we think of the noun as the center of a planet and the English prepositions to its left as layers outward (leftward) from the noun (center), the metaphor seems to work - almost. However, when we consider the fact that the Earth's actual structure is also filled with exceptions caused by forces other than gravity, the metaphor works even better.

Continuing with the gravity metaphor, adjectives conveying opinions are the least weighty and appear towards the left end of the adjectival sequence, much like the atmosphere of a planet is furthest from the planet's center. Opinions are epistemological lightweights in comparison to the heavier real facts based on knowledge. They float leftward in the adjectival chain towards its outer edge - where they belong. (A planet is still a planet without its atmosphere, but gas is never an atmosphere without its planetary body.)

Likewise, if we strip away the adjectives of opinion that weigh upon a noun, the meaning of a sentence is only changed slightly and sometimes not at all. On the other hand, if we strip away the adjectives that determine the essential nature of the thing referred to by a noun phrase, we significantly change the meaning of the sentence.

While none of the above will lead to hard-and-fast rules about the ordering of adjectives, it appears to be a good heuristic to apply when struggling to figure out the proper order. The above also makes the ordering of adjectives less arbitrary and easier to understand.

There are other forces, in addition to the structure of the human brain and epistemology, that appear to play a role in the ordering of adjectives. One of these factors is based on usage alone. When we become accustomed to placing one specific word directly next to another, we feel more comfortable with that ordering, even when it violates the influence of other factors upon the ordering. A catchy word chunk that spreads around a language community programs speakers to treat the word chuck like a single unit. We can think of this unit as akin to a molecule. Under the planetary metaphor above, a planet is not stratified by elements alone. It is stratified by molecules. Think of these word chunks as molecules.

Finally, another force is free will. An author or speaker might wish to emphasize one attribute over another or a poet might choose a sound pattern or rhythm over grammatical orthodoxy. There are times when rules are meant to be broken!

When learning how to order adjectives in any language, unless you are a linguist, do not expect a clear and certain list of rules to explain the ordering. Such lists do exist, but they are all subject to many exceptions. Accept that this is a complicated topic influenced by many factors that are both understood and not understood. In the end, it comes down to years of exposure to the language as it is used and the instincts that arise from it.

Behind the Scenes

Stephen DeVoy is our CELTA certified English instructor. He is also a degreed computer scientist, a degreed philosopher, and an inventor (two patents to his name). In addition to teaching English in Sardinia and online from the Republic of Georgia, he creates most of our online content and reference materials. Stephen is also our website creator. An interesting aspect of his technique is the use of Google sheets to generate content for our website. Stephen has programmed various Google sheets to generate the HTML code that produces our pages which are then published online.

Ukrainian and Russian Influence on the Culture of the Anglopshere: Mikhail Bulgakov

Mikhail Bulgakov was born 15 May, 1891 in the city of Kyiv Ukraine. During the era of Stalin, Bulgakov was a suppressed writer. His famous novel The Master And The Margarita is a satire of the life of a writer under Stalin. The Master And The Margarita was banned in the USSR, but circulated secretly until "a censored version was published in Moscow magazine in 1966–1967, after the writer's death". I read the book on the recommendation of a friend in the Republic of Georgia, a former republic of the USSR.

Long has Sympathy for the Devil, a song by the Rolling Stones, been among my favorites. Recently, a friend in the USA mentioned that the The Master And The Margarita was the inspiration for Jagger's Sympathy of the Devil. This made sense, given the theme of the song and the plot of the book. I researched this connection and it turns out to be true. I was pleased to learn of this connection between one of my favorite books and one of my favorite songs. Below I offer two videos - one showing scenes from a movie based on the book while the song plays in the background and the other a music video for the song produced by the Rolling Stones featuring lyrics in the video.

British or American English US/UK: Which one should you study?

There are many videos on this question. American videos take the view that American English is a better choice and British videos take the view that British English is a better choice. This video is from an Australian. I agree with most of her points. She argues based on the number of countries adhering to one standard or the other. While it is true that more countries adhere to the British standard, the fact is that in shear numbers, the number of speakers of American English is much larger, the influence of American English on media and business is much larger, and the comprehension of American English is more universal (due to the media and business influence).

Nevertheless, she makes a good point. If your mission includes impressing a British university for the purpose of studying there, the British are more strict in what they consider to be proper English. American universities, on the other hand, take a more holistic view on what constitutes proper English - a view more consistent with the position of linguists: all varieties of English are equally valid. In the USA, you are free to use British or American spelling and grammar. In the UK, a country with a much smaller population, universities expect you to conform to their own British dialect that they presume is "correct".

American English branched off from British English during the early colonial years of North America. Since then, it has evolved and flourished into its own and does not look to the English across the ocean as an authority on the English language. With a much larger population and greater influence upon the world, American English has become a source of new vocabulary for English around the world. While the powers-that-be in the UK imagine themselves arbiters of the English language, these Americanisms creep from the bottom up into British English. In reality, at this point in history, American English has a greater influence on the English language globally - not British English.