The Cambridge Guide to Australian English Usage - Noel's ESL ...

americanisation
During the nineteenth and early twentieth century, American English developed
independently of Britain, and this is reflected in the countless distinctively
American expressions for material and technological innovations of that period.
American use of gas, kerosene, phonograph and tire contrasts with the British
petrol, paraffin, gramophone and tyre. American English remained untouched by
spelling modifications which developed in British English during the nineteenth
century, hence its preference for check, curb, disk and racket, where British
English has cheque, kerb, disc and racquet for certain applications of those
words. Other examples where American English preserves an older spelling are
aluminum, defense, distill and jewelry (rather than aluminium, defence, distil and
jewellery).
In the details of grammar and usage, American English shows considerable range
from the liberal to the conservative. The liberal views of Webster on things such as
the use of whom and shall v. will contrast with the strictures of school grammarians
of the nineteenth century, the archetypal Miss Fidditch and Miss Thistlebottom.
Usage books of the twentieth century have shown the same wide range of opinion,
some allowing American usage to distance itself from accepted British usage (e.g.
on whether bad can be an adverb), and others seeking to bring it back into line with
British English.
American divergences from British English are shown in many entries in this
book. American English is often quite regular in its writing practices, as in the use
of -or rather than -our in color etc., and of single rather than double l in traveler.
In matters of editorial style, American English has been well served by the Chicago
Manual of Style, first published in 1906, and updated in successive editions up to
the fifteenth (2003). The greater streamlining of American punctuation practice,
in comparison with British, can be seen in the consistent use of double quotation
marks, and in the rules for deploying other punctuation marks with them. (See
further under quotation marks.)
americanisation The appearance of American words in Australia is an
expressed concern of some Australians, though not usually younger ones, as it
emerged from Australian Style surveys conducted in 2001–2. In fact Australian
English has absorbed American usages since the mid-nineteenth century (e.g.
block, state), and others in the 1930s such as dago, bluff, boss, which even the
older Australians surveyed seem to regard as our own. It’s all a matter of time!
But Australians also typically adapt American loanwords to their own purposes,
(e.g. buddy, which is not your ordinary friend, but an assigned partner, as in a
dive group). The “American” term often takes on a new meaning here, and is thus
effectively “australianised” (Bell and Bell 1998). It is not as if scattered borrowings
are changing the whole character of the Australian vocabulary. Most aspects of
Australian English remain untouched (Peters 1998a).
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