why is it Americans spell and pronounce so many words differently to the rest of the world?

Question

for example: "defense" instead of defence (but not "fense" instead of fence!), "color", etc. And pronunciations such as for vase, aluminium (there IS a second i in the word!), etc. I'm not talking about just having a different accent because obviously everywhere in the world has accents, but these words they say are just plain pronounced wrong. Are they all stupid, or does their need to believe that they are the most superior beings in all the Universe somehow blind them to their own ignorance? I'm just curious.

Answer 1

Pop culture and street slang have influenced our version of the english language. We have butchered it and are creating an entire new language. Word! dis iz de schizzle!

Answer 2

Because we're special!

Seriously though, language evolves over time and changes occur on their own. Its only been within the last 100 years that we can all HEAR each other all the time, anywhere in the world. It was only then that we ALL realized that we speak differently.
I think some of the reason we have different spellings and such are the influence of other languages that we have here with such a melting pot. That and so many people lived out on the prairie and with only their families that they had no outside influences for their speaking and spelling.

It had nothing to do with us feeling "superior", its just how language is dynamic, not static.

Answer 3

First of all the accents have changed over a period of time. The people who originally came over here speaking English sounded very different than the Britons of today. I have a feeling many of the words that we pronounce "incorrectly" are close to how they were pronounced 300 years ago. As far as spelling, you can blame the early dictionary writers. They spelled the words like they sounded. We pronounce realize with a definite "zee" sound (I know you say it Zed); therefore, it was spelled with a "z" instead of an "s". Personally I don't think any one country is filled with "the most superior beings in all the Universe". I for one find the differences in the way English is spoken and written in various countries quite interesting, and I appreciate the differences.

Answer 4

Look up every word in the American English dictionary and research it's roots. Each word is from another language which is made up from some other language made up by someone who wanted a different life away from what they were already living. Why do the Polish speak Polish and the Russian speak Russian, when it's the same slavic root? Why do the Germans speak German and the Danes speak Danish when it's the same Germanic root?

Answer 5

It is not ignorance. America has had influence from all over the world and some of the pronunciations and spellings are from other languages than English. True, some of it doesn't make much sense.

Answer 6

We speak a different dialect of English than most of the world. It is not ignorance.

Answer 7

Look in the mirror if you wish to gaze upon the being that considers itself superior to all others.

We speak American English. We are not part of the Commonwealth (we won the war!).

Mexicans, Cubans and Puerto Ricans don't speak Castillian Spanish. C'est la vie!

Answer 8

some americans talked slangs that sometimes i didnt understand, but im still interested of learning their lingual language, but some are perfectly talked english, maybe you are right in your opinion.

Answer 9

aluminum / aluminium ... potato/potahto
"accident of time and place" => manner of 'proper' spelling and pronunciation:

[nothing to get all ruffled over]

((ps: I was mildly humiliated in 5th grade for using the UK pronunciation .... oops ))




Why two spellings?

Following up a Topical Words piece on the international spelling of what British English writes as sulphur, many American subscribers wrote in to ask about another element with two spellings: aluminium.

The metal was named by the English chemist Sir Humphry Davy (who, you may recall, “abominated gravy, and lived in the odium of having discovered sodium”), even though he was unable to isolate it: that took another two decades’ work by others. He derived the name from the mineral called alumina, which itself had only been named in English by the chemist Joseph Black in 1790. Black took it from the French, who had based it on alum, a white mineral that had been used since ancient times for dyeing and tanning, among other things. Chemically, this is potassium aluminium sulphate (a name which gives me two further opportunities to parade my British spellings of chemical names).

Sir Humphry made a bit of a mess of naming this new element, at first spelling it alumium (this was in 1807) then changing it to aluminum, and finally settling on aluminium in 1812. His classically educated scientific colleagues preferred aluminium right from the start, because it had more of a classical ring, and chimed harmoniously with many other elements whose names ended in –ium, like potassium, sodium, and magnesium, all of which had been named by Davy.

The spelling in –um continued in occasional use in Britain for a while, though that in –ium soon predominated. In the USA, the position was more complicated. Noah Webster’s Dictionary of 1828 has only aluminum, though the standard spelling among US chemists throughout most of the nineteenth century was aluminium; it was the preferred version in The Century Dictionary of 1889 and is the only spelling given in the Webster Unabridged Dictionary of 1913. Searches in an archive of American newspapers show a most interesting shift. Up to the 1890s, both spellings appear in rough parity, though with the –ium version slightly the more common, but after about 1895 that reverses quite substantially, with the decade starting in 1900 having the –um spelling about twice as common as the alternative; in the following decade the –ium spelling crashes to a few hundred compared to half a million examples of –um.

Actually, neither version was often encountered early on: up to about 1855 it had only ever been made in pinhead quantities because it was so hard to extract from its ores; a new French process that involved liquid sodium improved on that to the extent that Emperor Napoleon III had some aluminium cutlery made for state banquets, but it still cost much more than gold. When the statue of Eros in Piccadilly Circus in London was cast from aluminium in 1893 it was still an exotic and expensive choice. This changed only when a way of extracting the metal using cheap hydroelectricity was developed.

It’s clear that the shift in the USA from –ium to –um took place progressively over a period starting in about 1895, when the metal began to be widely available and the word started to be needed in popular writing. It is easy to imagine journalists turning for confirmation to Webster’s Dictionary, still the most influential work at that time, and adopting its spelling. The official change in the US to the –um spelling happened quite late: the American Chemical Society only adopted it in 1925, though this was clearly in response to the popular shift that had already taken place. The International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) officially standardised on aluminium in 1990, though this has done nothing, of course, to change the way people in the US spell it for day to day purposes.

It’s a word that demonstrates the often tangled and subtle nature of word history, and how a simple statement about differences in spelling can cover a complicated story.