RRHH Digital The American way of speaking English is very popular today because of American television. In English speaking countries all over the world, everyone watches American TV shows and that’s why lots of common slang words come from America.
Examples of these new words include bromance, chillax and swag. A ‘bromance’ is a strong friendship between two men; ‘chillax’ is acommand to tell someone to calm down and ‘swag’ is a person’s style.
Americans love abbreviations and cute terms, and with the advent of textspeak (language used in mobile phone text messages), a whole new language is being created by the new digital generation.
Examples of these words are googleganger, which is another person who has the same name as you on Google or Frankenfood, which is food that is not natural.
The idea of creating new words from old English words in not new for the Americans. It started when the very first settlers arrived back in the seventeenth century. These early settlers came from different parts of England, Scotland and Ireland.
But it was in the nineteenth century that the American language really started to change and be influenced by other European countries. That’s because during this century more than 35 million people came to America from Germany, Italy, Holland, Scandinavia and Greece.
They brought with them their own languages. Many words today in modern American English come from German. Works like spesenritter (which means someone who like to flash money) and packesel (which means someone who carries all the luggage when you travel) are German words that are still in common use by Americans today.
Many modern American English words are Italian and they include words like pasta, spaghetti, macaroni, ravioli and pizza. Dutch is also a huge influence on American English. The Dutch gave English two very important words. The first word is Santa Claus and the other word is dope, which we use to talk about drugs.
So American English is really a huge mix of languages from all over Europe that has been changing continuously for the last two centuries and continues to change today.
Follow our next post to learn some vocabulary!
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