LONDON – Orais Hallahan never sits on the couch. I never wear sweaters. Don’t take out trash. Why would she do that? She is British. Hallahan is sitting on the couch. I’m wearing a jumper. They take out the garbage.
“I don’t usually use American words when I speak. I try to stick to British English words, but my friends do,” Hallahan, 10, said one school night after a play date.
“I believe that ‘play date’ is another Americanism,” agreed her mother, Grainne.
Differences between American English, British English, and Irish English extend to spelling, pronunciation, idioms, and even the format of dates, numbers, and some punctuation. This gap has long been a source of misunderstanding, superiority complexes, and humor. Irish writer Oscar Wilde said in 1887, “We have really nothing in common with America today, except, of course, language.”
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More than half a century later, Wilde’s fellow Irishman, playwright and literary critic George Bernard Shaw, was credited with opening up a rift over how the United States and Britain were “two nations divided by a common language.” No one seems to know where, in what context, or if the show actually said it, but never mind.
But it appears that the contentious language politics of “Tomite” versus “Tomahat” has entered a new chapter, or at least been reconsidered. Teachers across the UK say they are increasingly observing young pupils using “candy” instead of “sweets”, “nappy” instead of “nappy”, “elevator” instead of “lift”, “apartment” instead of “flat” and other words and phrases associated with American English. They see this as part of a generalized transatlantic cultural surge fueled by the daily instant diet of TikTok, YouTube, Netflix, and other transnational digital services.
“You hear snippets of their speech, you see snippets of their sentences, and they use real American slang all the time,” said Shabnam Ahmed, head of the English department at a school in Bury St Edmunds, a town near Cambridge. Her students range in age from 11 to 16.
“One of my students called me ‘uncle’ the other day, and I thought, ‘What does that mean?’
Her students helped her.
“‘Miss, that means you’re old,'” Ahmed said she was told. She is 34 years old.
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Ahmed said she is not necessarily sure whether the words she hears students use originated in the United States or came to them through other channels, such as Britain’s rich multicultural urban areas. New slang is often spread throughout the country through music and the Internet, and British English is often influenced by various English languages. It includes not only American, but also Jamaican Patois, African English, South Asian languages, and various forms of speech associated with the British working class.
But she said she has certainly noticed more students using distinctly American English words, such as “gotten,” which is the past participle of the verb “get.” In British English, the participle is “got.” I have a new guitar. I got a new job. In the US, it would be “I got a new guitar.” I got a new job.
“My students always say things like ‘federal government,'” Ahmed added. “We don’t even have the FBI here.”
British people say “rubbish”
The available data seem to support this pattern of increased importation of American languages.
More than half of the 10,000 elementary school teachers surveyed said they had recently heard a student use words such as “rubbish” or “rubbish” instead of the British term “rubbish,” according to survey data shared with USA TODAY by Teacher Tap, which surveys British educators on school-related issues to inform public policy.
Among British middle and high school students, the figure was 33%. The Teacher App found similar levels of use of terms such as ‘candy’ rather than ‘sweets’ by children in the UK. Teachers also reported hearing students use words such as “fire engine,” “booger,” “sidewalk,” and “move the theater.” All of these are believed to have been imported from America.
Dr. Tapp believes this study is the first of its kind, meaning there are no statistical benchmarks to evaluate the findings and determine whether they reflect a quantitative increase over time.
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But British teachers who have been doing the job for decades say there is no question that the children they teach are using American words more frequently.
Stephen Lockyer is a primary school teacher in Surrey, a relatively wealthy county southwest of London. He has been teaching children ages 5 to 11 for 20 years. He said he now hears students using words like “sweater” all the time, which is a big change from past years.
Mr Lockyer said he believed this change was at least partly due to British children consuming large amounts of US-originated content on platforms such as TikTok and YouTube.
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According to an industry study, 72% of 2-12 year olds in the UK watch YouTube. They spend an average of 83 minutes there each day. One of the most popular YouTubers in the UK is an American ‘Mr Beast’ named Jimmy Donaldson. His 452 million subscribers tune in to watch his high-budget stunts and charity work. The other is CoComelon, a 3D animated nursery series featuring the adventures of “Baby JJ” and his family. It was created by Jay John, also an American.
Mr Lockyer said it was “very common” to hear children at the school imitating American accents, especially when singing in the hallways, during special activities and at end-of-term celebrations. He admitted it was “weird” to sing “Empire State of Mind,” a perennially popular song by American rapper Jay-Z and singer-songwriter Alicia Keys, “in a posh British accent.”
He added that it’s not just American words and intonations that have penetrated the minds of British schoolchildren. It’s also politics. He said that in his experience, many British schoolchildren are familiar with President Donald Trump, but cannot necessarily name their own British prime minister.
“Trump is a brand,” Lockyer said. “Kids understand the brand.”
Some British parents report that their children speak with an American accent when they least expect it. “My 15-year-old son asked me to open the boot to put gas in while we were out driving the other day!” said one user on Mumsnet, a British social media platform geared towards parents and mostly women, in response to a reporter’s question posted on the site. Strictly speaking, “boot” rather than “trunk” and “petrol” rather than “gas” were the expected words in British English.
British invasion – verbal
Still, the flow of language is not all one-way.
Ben Yagoda, an American author and former English professor, started blogging in 2011. In that blog, he explored examples of what he calls “non-once Britishisms” (NOOBS), or British words and usage that have somehow infiltrated American speech and writing in a variety of ways.
Yagoda said that while “stories of Americans defiling or poisoning the purity of British English” have been around for hundreds of years, many words and expressions from British English have also been exported to the United States and entered the American lexicon to varying degrees.
“The word ‘brunch’ is one of them,” he says. “This is slang used in Oxford and Cambridge in the 1890s, and is now more popular in the United States.” His 2024 book “Gobsmacked!” examined many other works, including “one-off,” “go missing,” “curate,” “early days,” “easy pesy,” and “full of beans.”
Additionally, when many children were stuck indoors during the COVID-19 pandemic, some American parents reported that their children were saying “mama” instead of “mommy” and using phrases like “good luck” as pigs and other animal families with British accents spent more time playing games, visiting relatives and snorting and jumping into muddy puddles.
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Nevertheless, some language experts are skeptical about how meaningful, lasting, and indeed surprising, it is that two countries that share a language can influence each other.
“Ever since the advent of radio and cinema, American words have continued to enter British English,” said Peter Torgill, a former language professor from Britain. “It’s a demographic issue. They actually hear more American English than they hear British English, because there are more British people.”
Also, M. Lynn Murphy, an American-born professor of linguistics at the University of Sussex in the United Kingdom, said that teachers and parents reporting that their children use more Americanisms is not the same as children using them more.
“If a child says ‘candy’ in a playground in the UK, people will notice it. If they say ‘sweetie’ a million times, no one will notice it,” she said, highlighting that what we notice and the conclusions we draw from it are often biased.
“It’s not that common in the UK to call ‘elevator’ an ‘elevator’,” she says. “This is one of the most common news articles on the subject, as well as news articles from the 1960s about the Americanization of British English.”
Murphy also noted that the vocabulary is highly portable.
“Words move,” she said. “It’s the accent that doesn’t move much.”
Hallahan, 10, said it was “really frustrating” when her friends said “couch” instead of “sofa.” She said she doesn’t watch much YouTube or follow American influencers.
She said that one time, after spending a lot of time with friends, she “accidentally” uttered American in front of her “nan,” which refers to her British grandmother. She said her grandmother got mad at her for that. That word was “garbage.”
