American English has the full confidence of an established, independent literary language, something it perhaps lacked before the first world war. Mark Twain was the wellspring for this, later bolstered by William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway. It provides a superb medium for the novelist, essayist, journalist and poet.
American English is muscular and flexible, not insular. It cheerfully filches whatever it finds useful from foreign languages and from other national varieties of English. Twenty years ago, an American journalist would write that a person sought after had "turned up missing". Now Americans use the British form "gone missing" without turning a hair. Similarly, use of the noun "mobile" for "mobile phone" has recently spread to America to the extent that it will appear in the next edition of our dictionary. We do not stand on tradition if it is not useful. American English, especially among the younger generation, feeds on change, variety, flexibility and innovation—exactly the attributes needed for a future that is coming at us with accelerating velocity. Areas, where American efforts and know-how excel, are exactly the most fertile areas for new language: medicine, technology (especially computer technology), communications. What is discovered or invented in America is first named in America. If we are going to choose for the future, the choice seems already made.
However, historically most persuasive, there's the obvious argument that such a proposal is utterly at odds with the character and traditions of the English language. Pragmatically, we know it just won't work. Unlike French, which has always been administered, top-down, by the Académie Française, and the graduates of the grandes écoles, English operates bottom-up and derives its energy from the preferences of the many, not the few. The classic statement of the democratic and populist instinct of the language comes in Walt Whitman's inspiring preface to his celebrated collection, "Leaves of Grass". "The English language", declared Whitman, "is not an abstract construction of dictionary makers. It is the powerful language of resistance; it is the dialect of common sense. It is the speech of the proud, and of all who aspire, and"—here comes the clincher—"it has its basis broad and low, close to the ground."
Many also believe that American English is regressive and as we have reached the 21st century, and a new millennium, we no longer have any need for an outmoded set of linguistic conventions dating back to the 1770s. We have a perfectly functional, and adaptable, international lingua franca, based on British and American grammar and syntax. There is also a need to reject American English as it has been used by America as the vehicle for the international promotion of its cultural and political agenda.
