Today's post, I'm happy to say, is a guest post by Maddy Argy, an A-level student who's doing (BrE) work experience with me at the University of Sussex. I've asked her to find American-British differences that she could research and have introduced her to some of the tools we linguists use. I'm happy to introduce her first post!
When reading a blog post written by an American English speaker, I noticed she used the phrase to each their own which didn't sound natural to me. Previously, having lived in Britain all my life, I have primarily used and heard only each to their own.
The phrase is used in both American and British English, however most likely originated from Latin.
In the Corpus of Global Web-Based English, to each their own is heavily used in American English, with a total of 418 in all its forms. In British English however there is a total of only 105.
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| To Each His Own 1946 |
The phrase is used in both American and British English, however most likely originated from Latin.
In the Corpus of Global Web-Based English, to each their own is heavily used in American English, with a total of 418 in all its forms. In British English however there is a total of only 105.
Meanwhile here it's clear that each to their own is more commonly used in British English with a much larger total of 365, and only 68 of this form in American English.
So why is there such a significant difference?
In the table above from the Corpus of Historical American English we're looking at 'each to their own', which is most heavily used by speakers of British English. At a stretch it could go back as far as the 1820s, but only seems to be in popular use around the 1860s.
When looking at the American English version, it comes into scarce usage around the 1880s, but seems to gain popularity around the 1940s. After looking into where the phrase was actually used, it was all down to the release of the (BrE) film/ (AmE) movie, 'To Each His Own' in 1946 which might be able to explain the later difference considering this is how the phrase was brought to attention in America early on.
The older British English version seems to be in most popular use in the US until around the 1980s, at which point it becomes less used and the American English version becomes more common, so this would explain why to each sounded so foreign to me.
--M.A.
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