Prince Harry’s ‘Americanisms’ are no such thing

Ever since Prince Harry moved to Los Angeles, royal commentators with an interest in the English language have been watching what he says. He may have walked the walk but has he also started to talk the talk? In October 2020, the Mail ran a piece headed ‘Prince Harry calls opening the bonnet ‘popping the hood’ as he picks up Americanisms after seven months in US with Meghan Markle’. In May 2021, the Express announced ‘Prince Harry swaps Queen’s English for Americanisms in desperate bid to “be liked”‘, gasping that ‘Prince Harry has dropped elements of his cut-glass English accent in favour of Americanisms’. Just last week, as Harry spoke about his mother’s work combating the stigma around HIV and AIDS, some people felt their hackles rise regarding his choice of words: ‘I feel obligated to try and continue [her work] as much as possible’. Why use the American ‘obligated’ when the British ‘obliged’ is right there?

Harry has also been criticised for scattering Americanisms throughout his Archewell podcast, addressing his audience as ‘you guys’ and describing things as ‘awesome’. But anyone thinking all this is evidence of a recent change to his language hasn’t been paying attention: Harry has never had a ‘cut glass’ accent and his idiolect – his personal way of speaking – owes more to the English public school system than to his American wife. If you’ve ever found yourself in close proximity to a group of modern public school boys, what strikes you is not their adherence to the norms of received pronunciation and vocabulary but their keenness to distance themselves from them. Frankly, talking posh isn’t cool.

The young upper classes have been early adopters of US slang for generations. Think of Bertie Wooster, whose zippy lines are almost as full of American slang as they are of English:

Here, with a sniff like the tearing of a piece of calico, she buried the bean in her hands, and broke into what are called uncontrollable sobs.
— P. G. Wodehouse, The Code of The Woosters, 1938

‘Bean’ (meaning ‘head’) feels traditionally British, perhaps reminding us of ‘old bean’. It’s actually US slang from the early 20^th century (related to ‘bean ball”, a baseball term for a ball pitched at the batter’s head), as are countless other beloved Woosterisms, from ‘on the blink’ to ‘spill the beans’. Even that quintessentially English phrase ‘stiff upper lip’ comes from America, its first recorded use being in the Massachusetts Spy of 1815.

Wodehouse’s contribution to the Americanisation of British English gets some commentators rather hot under the collar (another Americanism). In his impassioned plea for resistance, That’s The Way it Crumbles, the writer Matthew Engel laments: ‘If there is a Typhoid Mary in the Americanisation epidemic of the 1920s the name of the No.1 carrier must be the creator of Bertie Wooster and Jeeves.’

What’s more, for Engel, the fight against the Americanisation of English is as much about culture as it is about language: if Brits mindlessly import American words into their dialect, we risk unconsciously adopting American ideas along with them. Hence, Engel argues, the Americanisation of the language goes hand in hand with the Americanisation of the culture, playing a part in everything from Thatcherism to Blairism to people losing interest in the countryside. 

But we’d be wrong to assume that this fear of cultural invasion runs only one way. Long before he published his great American dictionary in 1806, Noah Webster argued that establishing linguistic independence from the British was as critical for Americans as political independence.

Language reform, for Webster, was a chance to build egalitarian principles into the very way Americans spoke and wrote. Hence spelling would be simplified – no more unnecessary ‘u’s in ‘honor’ and ‘humor’, no more Frenchified ‘-re’ endings to ‘meter’ and ‘center’. Irregularities would be removed where possible. And as well as fostering a new and enlightened national identity, these changes would support the American printing industry: new books for a new country. Even today there are Americans concerned about the influence of British English: the US website www.notoneoffbritishisms.com attempts to keep track of what it refers to as the ‘Britishism invasion’.

While America’s greater size and cultural heft can make it feel as if the influence is all one way, actually Brits are holding their own. The cultural behemoth of the Harry Potter industry has played a large part in this: while the books were lightly edited for their American audience, care was taken to keep their essential Britishness: they evoke a rather old-fashioned and romantic boarding school world and the British language is part of the charm. One slightly surprising result of this is the US adoption of the British word ‘ginger’ to describe red hair, thanks to Harry’s side-kick, hapless red-head Ron Weasley.

And what of Meghan in all this? The royal watchers who look out for Americanisms in Harry’s language now he’s in the States were equally keen to spot Britishisms from Meghan when she was over here. The results were…underwhelming. Claims that Meghan had started speaking with a British accent were largely exaggerated and quickly debunked. But, had she stayed here longer, it’s highly likely that her both her accent and vocabulary would have changed through a process known as accommodation, that unconscious imitation which so many of us do when speaking to somebody with a different accent. As it is, the sole reported Britishism she has taken back to the States with her is a tendency to say ‘oh dahling!’ without the ‘r’.