It's about time this topic has its own blog post. It's been an aside to other discussions on several occasions. It's not so much a difference between American and British English per se, but a difference in how our political systems work, and hence a difference in which words we need to use about them.
Because the UK has a parliamentary system of government, the political party that controls the parliament is the ruling party of the government as a whole. So, people talk about the Labour government ortheConservative government when that party has the majority of seats in the House of Commons, since that party chooses the person who will be prime minister, who then makes the political appointments to cabinet positions. That party is, essentially, governing.
The US has a presidential system, in which the president is elected independently of the legislature. The executive (presidential) and legislative branches of government are accorded their own powers, and the party in control of the executive branch may not be in control of either or both of the legislative chambers (the Senate and the House of Representatives). So when talking about the president and cabinet, it's inaccurate to say things like the Obama government (let me live in the past, please), since the president leads only one branch of the government. Instead, we usually speak of the Obama administration.
So, this isn't really a difference between AmE and BrE because if Americans talk about British politics, they would need the more parliamentary language, and if Britons talk about American politics, they'll need the more presidential language, for accuracy. But do people always speak accurately about these things?
For government, they mostly do. The images below show the most common words between the and government in the AmE & BrE parts of the Corpus of Global Web-Based English, which was collected in 2012–13, when the UK had a coalition government of the Conservative and Liberal Democrat parties. There, you can see coalition and Labour in the UK data, but only general adjectives and countries in the American. That hasn't changed in more recent data. There's little talk about the Biden government or the Trump government.
Most common words before government in GloWbE AmE subcorpus
Most common words before government in GloWbE BrE subcorpus
At American sub-national levels, it works the same: American states have 'presidential' systems (just with governors, rather than presidents) and therefore they have administrations led by the governors, and American cities generally have city councils and mayors (details vary from state/city to state/city), and so we can talk of the administration of a mayor or a governor. You can see that in the GloWbE results below, where administration is mostly prefaced by names of presidents, but also, at the bottom Bloomberg, who was mayor of New York City at the time.
most common words between the and administration in US GloWbE
In the UK, Wales and Scotland have their own parliaments, and so we see them having governments in the chart above. At the county and city level, there are councils, and people tend to use the word council instead of government at the local level—e.g. the Labour council.
Directly elected mayors are a 21st-century thing in England, and we don't yet seem to be seeing much use of mayor's name + administration. I tried Johnson administration in GloWbE (since Boris J was London mayor in GloWbE time), but all examples in the UK referred to Lyndon Baines Johnson, the American president—and most of the other the ___ administration examples in UK GloWbE refer to American politics. (I also looked for the Khan administration in a more current corpus, but there one finds it referring to Pakistani politics, not the government of London.) But there is an interesting point at the bottom of this chart:
most common words between the and administration in UK GloWbE
The Labour administrationis about 29 times less common than the Labour government, but it's there. A closer look at the data indicates that this use of administration is more common in Scotland—with most, if not all of the Labours from Scotland, and certainly all of the SNPs (Scottish National Party):
Without any willingness to go through a lot of examples, I can't tell you how many of these administrations refer to the UK government versus devolved country governments or local governments, but I believe there's a mix. There are a very small number of cases of the Sunak administration and the Starmer administration as well.
Administration is not the first US political word I've seen used in a slightly-less-appropriate way in the UK: gerrymanderwas my US-to-UK Word of the Year in 2016. But lest you think political words only go in one direction, I'll point you to backbencher, my 2015 UK-to-US Word of the Year.
I'm saddened these days by a lot of things going on in the UK, particularly regarding the current government's treatment of education and healthcare. But, you know, I'm not a Conservative or even a conservative, so it's not surprising I'm not too happy with them. What's moving me to write today is the sadness I feel about aspects of the reaction to what's happening in education.
A bit of background: the Tory (BrE) government/(AmE) administration has made and continues to make many changes to schools and education in England. (The other countries of the UK can do their own thing—and as far as I can tell, they're being more sensible.) The changes include a lot more testing of spelling, punctuation and grammar (SPAG) with more specific and more daunting requirements on grammar at earlier ages. To give a comparison, the National Curriculum for Key Stages 1 and 2 (ages 4-11) mentions grammar (or grammatical) 35 times in 2015, compared with 6 times in 2010.
SPAG testing is just one aspect of sweeping changes to education in England under Secretaries of State for Education Michael Gove (2010-2014) and Nicky Morgan (2014-present), but it is an aspect that has been the focus of much attention and anger.
But what worries me sometimes in the rhetoric of the anti-testing movement is anti-grammar sentiments—separate from the anti-testing or anti-early-schooling sentiments. I've seen a lot of "down with grammar!" messages, often alongside "learning should be fun!" The implicit—and sometimes made explicit—message is that grammar takes the joy out of language. Fun and joy, as far as I'm concerned, are more about teaching than about subject matter. I want to take a moment to say "up withgrammar!"
To borrow an analogy from a friend, not wanting your child to learn about grammar [by which I mean: describing how sentences and words are structured] is like not wanting your child to learn about molecules and atoms. Yes, you can happily interact with matter without knowing that it is made up of elements, which are made up of atoms, and that those can combine with others to make all sorts of wonderful things. Not being able to explain the chemistry and physics involved will not stop you from making or enjoying a milkshake. But do you really not want to have a clue that there is more to the world than meets the eye? I've found it very useful to know what I learned at school about matter—even though I grew up and had to discover that there might not be any such thing as electrons. All the same, having a basic knowledge of a model of how matter works makes it easier for me to understand the science I hear about in the news. It helps me understand a little bit better when I read about new medical treatments. It also points out to me how little I know, and makes me a bit more curious about the things I don't know. It helped me learn about the scientific method and encouraged me to wonder at the scales of the universe.
Learning about how language works is like that. Learning about it can lead you to appreciate it more and to be less prejudiced about it, and if you go further with it, you might be able do a lot of things with that knowledge. Speech and language therapists can use it. Teachers can use it. Editors can use it. Cognitive psychologists can use it. Computer programmers and software designers can use it. Having a theory of what language is and how it works — what sentence is, what a word is — has lots of applications and can open up all sorts of other areas for investigation.
As Bas Aarts (of University College London's Survey of English Usage) explains in his response to being a scapegoat for anti-grammarism, any grammatical exercise is a test of a particular model of the grammar of the language. At university level, our students compare models. But we don't present more than one at school level, generally—not for language, not for physics, not (generally) for evolution. A problem in grammar teaching/learning sometimes is that several different models are available and no one's pointed that out, and so concepts from one are mixed up with concepts from another and things stop making sense.
Does that need to happen in the early years of school? No. And it doesn't need to be tested in pressure-filled rote ways. But if you are not confident in your (or your school staff's) knowledge of grammar and you don't have the resources (including TIME) to get that knowledge and confidence up, then teaching-to-a-test is what ends up happening.
As I've written about before,
grammar teaching has never been very strong in the UK. I don't want to
repeat everything I wrote at that blog post (relying a lot on Dick
Hudson and John Walmsley's research), so I do recommend clicking on that
link. This has left us with a situation where everyone involved in the
discussion has different half-developed ideas of what grammar means and which models are relevant. And in that situation, it's really easy to see why people are anti-grammar. Grammar
in that case seems like hocus-pocus that's used as a means to keep some
kids back. That may be the meaning of the SATs test, but it's not the
meaning of grammar.
The only grammar/language teaching to trainee teachers at my UK university was for those who were upgrading themselves from classroom assistant to teacher. (And that programme has since been cancel[l]ed.) It was just assumed that people who had studied literature and had university degrees would be able to teach what an adverb is, should the curriculum ask for grammar. And perhaps back in the day when many of our teachers were trained, there was no inkling of an idea that grammar would be taught at primary level. (Foreign language was made compulsory at primary level in 2010. Many current teachers would not have started their careers with that in mind either.)
In the US, the nature of grammar teaching will vary more as there is more state-by-state variation in curricula. (There is now a national 'Common Core' that is like the UK National Curriculum—but it specifies much less than the National Curriciulum does and the statements about grammar are more about "using standard grammar" than analy{s/z}ing sentences [link is PDF].) I've just checked the website of the Texan university where I last taught in the US (in 1999) and Modern English Grammar is still on the requirements for a Bachelor of Science in Education (English) for middle-school (AmE) grades upward—though now they're allowing people to substitute Introduction to Linguistics for it. (I used to teach both of those—and loved them.) In the US university-level grammar (not linguistics, but grammar) textbooks are big business. In the UK, I've not found a real equivalent to the grammar textbooks we taught with in the US. Again, my older post on grammar teaching covers other aspects of this.
My dream would be for kids to be able to learn about language by using observation, experimentation, discovery, categorization. All that good stuff. Learning how to think, not what to think. The ultimate transferable skill. And while many are working hard to make sure schools have access to the training and confidence to incorporate more linguistic discovery into their work, it seems like an impossible ask at a time when teachers are under an incredible amount of pressure from a government that likes to serve its educational reform with budget cuts.
Another good way to learn about grammar is by learning a language other than your own. Our experience teaching linguistics at university level is the exchange students can out-grammar all our UK-educated home students, because they've had to do metalinguistic thinking—thinking about languages—before. You don't need to learn the language by learning grammar—but being faced with the fact that your language does things differently from others gives insight into what grammar is.
In the meantime, here's a video of the strike rally that we attended today, from the Channel 4 news. The reporter is trying to be clever (I eventually figured out) by naming grammatical constructions he's about to say. It's fair to say, he didn't study much grammar either. (Best bit: when causal connective turns into casual connective. I'm thinking like could be added to the grammar tests as a casual connective.)
But even though I'm slightly taking the mickey out of that reporter, I do think it's not really fair when people pick on grown-ups' inability to answer the test questions. If schools only taught facts and theories that you'd remember as an adult, schooling would be very short indeed. What's important is not whether decades-later-me can explain what an electron is or what the French and Indian War was about or how to tell a preposition from a subordinating construction (ok, maybe I need that one for my job). What's important is
the thinking skills I honed when learning those things
the communication skills I developed in tasks related to those things
the knowledge that any part of the world can be analy{s/z}ed in interesting ways
the echo of those things in my mind, reminding me that things do have names and explanations and I could go look them up if I wanted to
P.S. Lots of other linguists and educationists and other interested people have written a lot of other things about this, but I couldn't take the time to link to them all. Feel free to suggest further reading in the comments!
* The SAT (Scholastic Aptitude Test) in the US is for (AmE) college/(BrE) university admissions. Lazily quoting Wikipedia, no one really knows what it stands for in England, as it's variously referred to as: "Statutory Assessment Tests, Standard Attainment Tests,Standardised Achievement Tests and Standard Assessment Tests".
The linguistic note here is that in the UK, it's pronounced as a word: Sats. In the US, the SAT is always S-A-T.
Thanks for your patience while I was not-really-blogging for the past month. During that time, I've been working in five UK cities/towns and two other EU countries (Germany, Malta)--not to mention preparing for all those meetings and (BrE) marking/(AmE-also) gradingmy brains out end-of-year essays/term papers and exams. Now I just have lots more student work to read and the page proofs of this book to correct and the collaborative book to finish...and...and...and...and should I really be blogging now? (Best not to think too hard about that.)
But how to get back into the blogging groove? Doing 'Differences of the Day' on Twitter has kept me and the groove on a nodding acquaintance, but which of the multitude of un-blogged-about topics should I start with? It's inbox roulette time again. This post's winner is Astro Brat, who wrote to ask:
Is the British version of "token" different than the American one?
I ask because in the last few days I've run across the term used by Brits that sounds more like where my mid-western US dialect would say voucher or perhaps coupon?
One was in a television show and I just assumed it meant the same -
"I hope you like this gift, because honestly it's either this or tokens"
But when I read this later in the week:
"it’s not a book that would have been top of my reading list, but I was in a bookshop and I had some book tokens so you know how it is!"
Where I come from token is a kind of coin used for amusement parks or kid's restaurant sort or things. It can also be a little small gift, a token present. Does Britain give out specific-use coins for bookstores?
AB has correctly surmised that in BrE a token is a kind of (AmE) gift certificate/(BrE) gift voucher. These days, one most often hears token in this meaning for one of two things: National Book Tokens or Theatre Tokens. These are sold at bookshops/box offices, but usable at almost any (BrE/AmE) bookshop/(AmE) bookstore or (BrE/sometimes AmE) theatre/(AmE) theater, not just the one at which it was purchased. For shop/store-specific gifts, I more often hear voucher, rather than token in BrE, but the OED has examples (latest from the 1980s) of shop-specific tokens, so there's not (historically, at least) a hard-and-fast meaning difference.
AB's little error is in transferring the coin property of (AmE) subway/amusement park tokens to the British context. Tokens are like American gift certificates, so traditionally paper, nowadays likely to be in the form of a gift card. There's a gallery of these at the National Book Token website, and while I could photograph the two in my (AmE) wallet/(BrE) purse for you, I am far too lazy, so here's one from the 1930s, courtesy of the NBT site (the relevant details would have been on the back) and the modern plastic type.
My two are really Grover's. They're paper ones with a value of £1 each, given to children in schools and (BrE) nurseries on National Book Day. I can't tell you how many books I've bought while holding the wallet/purse that holds those book tokens. I generally think of them about 10 minutes after the purchase, even if I've stepped into the bookshop with the specific goal of spending the tokens. So, Grover gets books and I contribute £2 more than I'd intended to the recovery of the retail sector.
(I also want to mention Bookstart, a lovely UK institution, which gives children free books (through their local libraries or at health check-ups) at three points in their preschool years. I've only just missed mentioning them on National Bookstart Day (11 June this year). Bookstart is a charity, funded by the government and book publishers. Given the slash-and-burn approach of the new (BrE) government/(AmE) administration, I am crossing my fingers for it. Not to mention for all jobs in higher education. *sigh*)
The notion of a token as a coin is not foreign to BrE. The OED has this sense-definition (though it includes subway tokens under the same sense as gift token):
11. a. A stamped piece of metal, often having the general appearance of a coin, issued as a medium of exchange by a private person or company, who engage to take it back at its nominal value, giving goods or legal currency for it.
From the reign of Queen Elizabeth to 1813, issued by tradesmen, large employers of labour, etc., to remedy the scarcity of small coin, and sometimes in connexion with the truck-shop system. bank-tokens, silver tokens for 5s., 3s., 1s. 6d., were issued by the Bank of England in 1811
You might need metal tokens in the UK for use in amusement parks or cloak-room lockers or such things--I don't know of any public transport systems using them here at present, but I'm happy to be informed otherwise.
Most other uses of token seem to be the same in the two dialects, though a draft addition to the OED marks this sense as US:
[3.] c. A nominal or ‘token’ representative of an under-represented group.
Does this mean that the joke of the South Park character Token's name has gone over some British heads? (Say it ain't so!)
And on that note, welcome back to my blog. I've missed you!
As frequent commenters on this blog can tell you, I am not all that up on the details of English as it is spoken in Scotland, nor in the north of England (or Wales, or Northern Ireland...). I'm in the south, on the south coast. South south south. So most of the Scottish speakers I hear are on television (or, in pleasant but intense weekend bursts, Scrabble tournaments). For a while, I was hearing a fair amount of Scottish-accented speech on The Thick of It, a political satire in which the government's spin doctor is played by (*sigh*) Peter Capaldi (whom I still have a crush on due to Local Hero—undaunted by the many more/less savo(u)ry characters he's played since then). In/on the program(me), the Scots seem to run the government really, and it's generally felt that this was made to reflect real life. Sometimes I think it reflects my real life too, as I work at a university in southern England that has a Scottish Vice Chancellor and a history of Scottish people running various administrative departments.
Linguistically speaking, this means that sometimes the unfamiliar terms that come up in the university's administration-speak are Scottish imports. I'm not sure if we're the only university south of the border in which the year's exam diet is spoken of, but my colleagues who have come from other parts of England to work here find this term as foreign as I do. In Scottish law, a diet is a court session—and in academia it is the series of exams and examination boards (a feat of mind-wrenching bureaucracy necessitated by the classification of degrees) that happens at the end of the academic year—i.e. the examination 'season'.
I was reminded of this today when I was filling out a form concerning a new course. It said:
List all the programmes which will include this course. This should include ALL programmes within and outwith your school.
This was not the first time I'd encountered outwith where I would say outside or possibly (but only if I wanted to sound highfalutin in AmE) without. But this time, I was moved to investigate it, and (whaddya know?) it's marked in my dictionaries as Scottish. (My concise dictionaries say Sc(ottish), while the OED says Now chiefly Sc.) A little further investigation on the (AusE>BrE) uni website reveals that the author of the document is a graduate of the University of Aberdeen.
I wondered whether I should start to develop a paranoid theory about the Scottish conspiracy to run my life and drown me in paperwork (for all of my paranoia is deliberate), but then I thought about the fact that all the Scottish people I know are super-nice and very efficient. Contrary to popular stereotypes, they always seem willing to buy a round of drinks. (So what if my sample size is limited to less than a dozen Scots? They're buying!) If these people do have plans to run my life, well, maybe I should let them. Perhaps it'll turn out that all the drink-buying was a ruse, but it's a lot better than the other paranoid fantasies I have to choose from.
Has a dialect difference emerged between US novel coronavirus/new
coronavirus and UK COVID-19, do you think? Novel coronavirus/new
coronavirus is favoured by Reuters, but I don't know whether that
counts in the dialect balance.
I hear plenty of COVID-19 from US sources, so that didn't strike me as quite right, but I had a look (on 29 April) at
the News on the Web (NOW) corpus, which (so far this year) had 226 covi* (i.e. words starting with covi-) per million words in US and 49 per million in UK. For coronav* it's 362 US v 92 UK. (I searched that way so that I'd get all variations, including COVID without the -19, without the hyphen, coronaviruses, etc.).
Now, I don't trust the geographical coding on the NOW corpus very
much, because you have things like the Guardian showing up in the US
data because it has a US portal that has US-particular content, but also
all the UK content—and that doesn't do us much good in sorting out AmE from BrE. I really don't know why the
per-million numbers are so much higher in the US sources, since the news in both places is completely taken over by the virus and stories related to it. But anyway, about 38% of the (named) mentions of the disease are COVID in the US and 35% in the UK, so there is no notable difference in preference for COVID. I found it interesting that the two newspaper apps on my phone (Guardian [UK] and New York Times) prefer coronavirus in headlines, even though COVID-19 is shorter.
But my colleague is right that there is a lot more new/novel coronavirus in US than UK. About 12% of AmE usages are prefaced by an adjective that starts with N, while only about 3% of BrE coronaviruses are. Distribution is fairly even between novel (from medical usage) and new. It's worth noting that since I'm only searching news media, new/novel is probably far more common in this dataset than it would be in everyday interactions.
Including the definite article (thecoronavirus) seems to be more common in AmE. If I just look for how many coronavirus occurrences are preceded by the, the proportion is 45% for AmE and 37% for BrE. this search hits examples like the one in the 'middle school' story on the left: the coronavirus lockdown where the the really relates to the lockdown. So, to try to avoid this problem, I searched for (the) coronavirus [VERB] and (the) coronavirus [full stop/period]. In those cases, then AmE news media have the the about 50% of the time, while BrE ones have it less than 30% of the time. That misses the new/novel coronavirus (because of the adjective between the and coronavirus), so the real difference in the before coronavirus is probably more stark.
The media's style guides are supposed to guide the choices journalists and editors make in phrasing such things, but how strictly they follow their own guides is another matter. I had a look at a couple:
coronavirus outbreak 2019-20 The virus is officially called Sars-CoV-2 and this causes the
disease Covid-19. However, for ease of communication we are following
the same practice as the WHO and using
Covid-19 to refer to both the virus and the disease in our general reporting. It can also continue to be referred to as the coronavirus. [I've added the bold on the latter]
The Associated Press(US) gives similar advice, though it goes into more particular rules for science stories.
As of March 2020, referring to simply the coronavirus is
acceptable on first reference in stories about COVID-19. While the
phrasing incorrectly implies there is only one coronavirus, it is clear
in this context. Also acceptable on first reference:
the new coronavirus; the new virus; COVID-19.
In stories, do not refer simply to coronavirus without the article the. Not:
She is concerned about coronavirus. Omitting the is acceptable in headlines and in uses such as:
He said coronavirus concerns are increasing.
Passages and stories focusing on the science of the disease require sharper distinctions.
COVID-19, which stands for coronavirus disease 2019, is caused by a virus named
SARS-CoV-2. When referring specifically to the virus, the COVID-19 virus and
the virus that causes COVID-19 are acceptable. But, because COVID-19 is the name of the disease, not the virus, it is not accurate to write
a new virus called COVID-19. [bold added]
In comparing the two passages you can see one predictable difference between them. AP writes COVID in all caps, Guardian has Covidwith the initial capital only. There is a widespread preference in BrE (and generally not in AmE) to differentiate between initalisms and true acronyms. (There's been a bit in the Guardian about it, here.)
In an initialism, you pronounce the names of the letters: the WHO stands for World Health Organization and it is pronounced W-H-O and not "who". It's spel{led/t} with all caps (or small caps), no matter where you live. (AmE styles are more likely than BrE styles to insist on (BrE) full stops/(AmE) periods in these: W.H.O.—but styles do vary.)
Acronyms use the initial letters of words to make a new word, pronounced as a word. The National Aeronautics and Space
Administration's short name is pronounced "nasa", making it a true acronym. All AmE styles that I know of spell it with caps: NASA. Many BrE styles spell it like any other proper name, with just an initial capital: Nasa.
This disease name provides a slightly different case because it's doesn't just use initial letters: COronaVIrusDisease. That's probably why I'm seeing some initial-only Covid in AmE, for instance in the Chronicle of Higher Education, where they spell other acronyms (like NASA) in all caps.
Other variants, like CoViD and covidare out there—but they are in the minority. COVID and Covidrule.While some other UK sources, like the Guardian, follow the initial-cap style (Covid), many UK sources use the all-cap style, including the National Health Service and the UK government.
And on that note, I hope you and yours are safe.
P.S. Since I'm talking about newspaper uses, I haven't considered pronunciation—but that discussion is happening in the comments.
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