On 20 Sep 2006 22:32:10 -0700, "Raymond S. Wise"
"I think it's because no one ever refers to "Australian ... of the world hates them. This is one small example."
"The average American rarely has occasion to refer to his variety of English as "American English." When we go to ... terms in Internet Usenet groups discussing English usage. Linguists and lexicographers find such terms useful too, of course."
From Chambers English Dictionary 7th ed.:
Chambers English Dictionary: An American View
Sidney I. Landau
author of Dictionaries: The Art and Craft of Lexicography
A strange thing has happened to the word 'English' in the last decade. It has become capable of being counted: one English, two Englishes, three Englishes-like peas or peppercorns. 'Let us now use the term "other Englishes",' writes Braj B. Kachru in Language in the USA, 'for those varieties of English which were spread and developed in areas other than the British Isles.'*
Once upon a time, the only recognized varieties of English were those found within Britain, and they were seldom accorded the status of English spoken in the few privileged public(1) schools and at the universities of Oxford and Cambridge. As the years passed, the Englishes of the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, India, the Caribbean and Africa developed new lexical forms and distinctive ranges of pronunciation that further distanced their speech from any recognizable variety of English used in the British Isles.
These varieties of English have developed their own standard forms and can no longer be usefully identified as offshoots of the English of Britain. Of course, this is an old story in America; Noah Webster in the 19th century and H. L. Mencken in the 20th century made the case for viewing American English as a separate language.
The words we use to describe things count in establishing status. It is not mere variety that disposes people to care very much about what their languages are called; it most directly and materially affects how others perceive them. American English is not a mere variation of a true and proper English; it has its own standard forms derived from the distinctive character of the United States, its political history, its customs and conventions, and the values and character of its people.
This difference goes far deeper than the trivial dualities so often cited in discussions of US/British differences (gas/petrol; elevator/lift; mail/post, etc). Perhaps more fundamental are those differences that suggest different types of humor, different processes for forming metaphor and slang, and the particular path of deviations from each national standard to forms considered incorrect. Why do Americans tend to use 'lay' for 'lie' or 'like' for 'as' or fall into the trap of hypercorrection and say,' He told James and I not to be late'?
Chambers dictionaries have long reflected an interest in American English. Chambers's English Dictionary of 1872 included an eight-page appendix of Americanisms printed in small type, three columns to the page. The appendix includes such familiar American expressions as 'cotton to', 'enthuse', 'human' (for human being), 'like' (=as), 'lay' (= lie), 'potwalloper', 'sockdolager', and 'reckon' (to think, imagine, believe, conjecture).
It must be acknowledged, however, that Chambers has not consistently maintained a full record of English as it is used in the United States. The current edition, retitled Chambers English Dictionary and thus restoring the original 1872 title, marks the beginning of the process of enlarging coverage of American English, while at the same time recognizing that this is essentially a dictionary of British English. American readers will find Chambers especially valuable in guiding them from the American form of a word to the form used in Britain and elsewhere in the English-speaking world. Those who already own an American dictionary can profit from owning this dictionary in addition; they will find that it covers much ground that no American dictionary touches.
* Ferguson, Charles A. and Shirley Brice Heath, eds. Language in the USA (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1981), p. 26.
(1) In UK usage "Public School" = private school.
Then a few pages on in that dictionary:
Some other varieties of English
British English and American English are only two
of the many varieties of English which exist in the world today. Other forms of English exist
elsewhere, notably in Canada, South Africa. India
and Pakistan, Australia and New Zealand. These
differ to a greater or lesser extent from the English of Britain and America with regard to vocabulary.
grammar, pronunciation and sometimes spelling.
Many words or meanings of words unique to these
regional forms are noted in the dictionary, e.g.
baas, billabong, coloured, hartal, joey. Some
guidance on the pronunciation and spelling is
given in the following notes. The grammatical
differences are for the most part beyond the scope of a dictionary.
Peter Duncanson, UK
(in alt.english.usage)