Lexis Episode 77 - Lynne Murphy and the 'Americanisation' of young people's English
Welcome to episode 77 of Lexis in which Raj & Dan talk to Lynne Murphy, Professor of Linguistics at the University of Sussex about a flurry of recent news stories about children’s adoption of American vocabulary (and even accents). We discuss:
What these stories are about and whether we can even tell if this 'Americanisation' is happening
The main themes in them and their precursors in previous panics about ‘Americanisation’
The discourses within and behind these stories
What motivates them and how to approach them critically
How British English is also making its way into American English
Lynne is author of ‘The Prodigal Tongue: the Love–Hate Relationship between British and American English’ , and the Separated by a Common Language blog.
You can also find her on Bluesky and other social media platforms under the name Lynneguist.
Bluesky here: https://bsky.app/profile/lynneguist.bsky.social
The stories we discuss are here:
The Times and Sunday Times feature itself: http://archive.today/9UM7W
‘Trash-talking children are sounding like Americans, say teachers
Garbage, candy and apartment are Americanisms that are growing more popular among younger pupils’
Kristina Murkett’s op-ed for The Telegraph,
‘The Americanisation of British English reveals this dark thing about our society
Many parents are happy to allow their children consume videos made by companies that have no obligation to care for them’
The Telegraph article links to this absolute stinker of a piece by Simon Heffer from 2024 too, ‘Americanisms are poisoning our language’
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/books/authors/americanism-english-language-simon-heffer/
A more sensible take from Charlotte Crips in The Independent, ‘Mom, can we take the elevator?’ Why I’m fine with my daughter speaking Americanese’
But some quite mixed responses to that piece from their readers: https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/americanisms-english-language-british-b2859043.html
We mention Ben Yagoda’s book, Gobsmacked https://uk.bookshop.org/p/books/gobsmacked-the-british-invasion-of-american-english-ben-yagoda/7669284?ean=9780691262291&next=t and the Guardian featured an extract from it here: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2024/sep/26/other-british-invasion-how-uk-language-conquered-the-us
A new one (possibly the worst of the lot) was published in The Spectator between recording the episode and publishing it. You can read the archived version here: https://archive.ph/2025.11.24-063603/https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/how-to-save-the-kings-english/
And we’ve been here before, obviously…
Matthew Engel:
‘Say no to the get-go! Americanisms swamping English, so wake up and smell the coffee’ (here, along with some teacher resources and student responses that Jacky and I put together years ago and the actual article: https://filestore.aqa.org.uk/resources/english/AQA-ALEVEL-ENG-HUB-SPR19-PAPER2-BOOKLET.PDF )
Mark Liberman’s response to Engel on Language Log in 2011: https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3290
Lexis is on Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/lexispodcast.bsky.social
Contributors
Lisa Casey
blog: https://livingthroughlanguage.wordpress.com/ & Twitter: Language Debates (@LanguageDebates)
Dan Clayton
blog: EngLangBlog & Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/englangblog.bsky.social
Jacky Glancey
Twitter: https://twitter.com/JackyGlancey
Raj Rana
Matthew Butler
Twitter: https://twitter.com/MatthewbutlerCA
Music: Serge Quadrado - Cool Guys
Cool Guys by Serge Quadrado is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. From the Free Music Archive: https://freemusicarchive.org/music/serge-quadrado/urban/cool-guys