Agreement in American English. In the first decades of the twenty-first century, the English language is “the most widely spoken language in the world (as a first or second language) (Fromkin, Rodman, and Xxxxx, 2014, p. 284). Although it is currently the national language of only a few countries (the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand), it has formidable roots in the former UK colonies in Africa and India and is a valuable medium of communication in many academic and scientific circles (Fromkin et al., 2014, p. 302). With a language that is spoken around the world, the presence of many dialects with varying degrees of divergence is unavoidable. However, despite the wide-ranging dialectical variation, “[a]ll speakers of English can talk to each other and pretty much understand each other” (Xxxxxxx et al., 2014, p. 279). Although there are many recognized dialects of the English language, the primary dialects are British English and American English. The mutually intelligible dialects of the English language, especially the British English and American English varieties, are differentiated primarily by accent, pronunciation, and vocabulary (Fromkin et al., 2014, p. 285). The accent and pronunciation variances in English are largely traceable to region and locale, but the American proclivity for vocabulary idiosyncrasies, that continues today unabated, was noted in Mencken’s copious study of the American tongue, The American Language: “The early Americans showed that spacious disregard for linguistic nicety which has characterized their descendants ever since. They reduced verb-phrases to simple verbs, turned verbs into nouns, nouns into verbs, and adjectives into either or both” (1937, p. 117). This propensity for stretching linguistic boundaries continues to this day and further contributes to the lugubrious grammar of a language in many ways poorly suited, or at least onerously Medusal, to fill the role of global tongue. More recently, Xxxxxx also characterized English in this vein: “English has horrendous orthography, an extremely complicated inventory of vowels, a few hundred irregular verbs, a huge vocabulary, and other features that make it ill- equipped to be a global language used by millions of people who must learn it in adulthood” (cited in Xxxxxxxxx, 2016, p. 474). In light of minor vocabulary differences, and despite the reality of syntactic differences between British English and American English (that pose no intelligibility issues), it s...
