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i heard that american English is wrong according to British people and people who use non american English? so is British English correct?

jlawler
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Tetrahedronx800
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    Yes, that is the reason why American English is wrong. Some people do say the British is correct. Especially the British people. – jlawler Sep 12 '20 at 18:51
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    :facepalm How can a language be wrong? According to what criteria? – tum_ Sep 12 '20 at 22:11

2 Answers2

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Both are dialects of the same language. It's impossible to establish which one is 'correct' scientifically. That's a matter of taste. The Received Pronunciation (a.k.a. standard British English) tends to have greater prestige than the Standard American English dialect. Still, there's no way to tell which one is correct objectively.

You might want to read something about linguistic normativity or linguistic correctness. People tend to believe that the dominant/high-prestige dialect of a language is the correct one, while other dialects are wrong. However, there's no scientific basis for such claims.

Werner
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  • Why is it impossible to establish scientifically whether American English is wrong and British English is correct, or vice versa? – user6726 Sep 12 '20 at 23:17
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    Science is concerned with describing and explaining phenomena. Linguistics aims at being a science, so the job of linguists is to describe and explain language(s). Science is not concerned with what is right or wrong, it simply describes and explains things in mechanistic terms. Linguists can answer questions such as "which dialect is older?," "which is more complex?," "how do they relate to one another?," or "why do people believe that one variant is better than others?" It's up to the speakers themselves or grammarians to decide which dialectal variant is the 'correct' one. – Werner Sep 13 '20 at 04:00
  • A theory which is false cannot be correct. Science is concerned with what it correct versus incorrect. You assume, incorrectly, that the only standard of correctness is something like "moral superiority", thus buying into a false presupposition. – user6726 Sep 13 '20 at 04:46
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    You seem confused. Or maybe you're just trying to confuse me (it didn't work). Science is concerned with what is true or false. OP wanted to know which variant of English is the 'correct' one, meaning the right one, o the better one. This is not a true/false question. You can't scientifically say that one variant is better than the other. There's no objective criteria for doing so. – Werner Sep 13 '20 at 04:57
  • Try not to mix up dialect and accent. It is possible to speak standard British English with a Yorkshire accent, it is possible to write in British English (and so have no accent at all) It is also possible to use RP to form non-standard, slang, and incorrect English. – James K Feb 04 '23 at 08:41
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Nothing is correct or wrong in a vacuum, it's only correct or wrong for some purpose – measured according to a specific standard. "The" is correct as spelling of the English definite article, and incorrect as a phonetic transcription of same. "American English" is correct as the answer to the question "what is the mother tongue of the majority of Americans", and incorrect as the answer to the question "what is the mother tongue of the majority of UK residents". The idea of a language being right or wrong is really not a sensible concept.

I suspect that people who have such opinions about English dialects mean "which dialect is linguistically closest to English as spoken by Shakespeare and his contemporaries?". I doubt that there is a meaningful metric that can assign a historical divergence index to daughter languages, and I very much doubt that anyone can give an empirically-supported evaluation of which language has diverged the most from The Common Tongue.

user6726
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