Last month, this article in the UK’s Observer got under my skin enough that I sat down and wrote a response in the form of a letter to the editor. There are so many linguistic misperceptions and downright falsehoods in the piece that, frankly, I had a hard time knowing where to start. Likewise, I had a hard time fitting all of my beef with the piece into the 300-word maximum specified for letters to the editor.

I chose to focus on what bothered me most, and that is that this man, who I am aware is a “very important person” in Britain, started the entire tirade by complaining about his granddaughter. Like, what kind of person does that? As if teenage girls don’t have enough self-esteem issues without their grandfather complaining about them in a newspaper which is read by millions of people around the world.

At any rate, it is clear that the letter will not be published elsewhere (no doubt there are bigger fish to fry than some linguist complaining about self-important men complaining about the demise of English), so I’ll publish it here.

Dear editors,

With reference to Peter Preston’s concerns about his granddaughter’s English (“The Americans are coming — but we’re like, whatever,” 30.07.2017): I assure Mr. Preston with 100 percent certainty that his granddaughter does not speak American English. Ask a hundred British people to assess her speech compared to an American teenager, and they will tell you the same thing: his granddaughter speaks British English. It is not the same British English that Mr. Preston speaks, and it won’t be the same English spoken in the UK in 50 years, but it is unmistakably British English. Unlike Mr. Preston’s claims, British English will never be “absorbed” by American English.

How do I know this? Because I am a scientist who studies language systems. My statements are based on 150 years of research in the field of linguistics, not on opinion. Mr. Preston’s complaints offer nothing new or enlightening, nor for that matter anything grounded in science. Contrary to popular belief, the influence of television and other forms of media remains relatively negligible when it comes to language contact and change. As Mr. Preston points out, vocabulary items such as you guys, like, and awesome may drift into everyday speech, but these are just words. Changes in how sentences are put together, changes in pronunciation – that’s a different story. The effects of media influence in these core areas is a growing field of inquiry: note, for example, Professor Jane Stuart Smith’s work on changes in the pronunciation of Glaswegian English in connection with the EastEnders series.

Decades of research shows that teenage girls are trendsetters when it comes to language change, and, no, people like Mr. Preston do not like it—after all, they are teenage girls, a most maligned segment of our population.

But really, picking on his own granddaughter?

Sincerely yours,

Elizabeth Peterson, PhD

University Lecturer, English Philology

Department of Modern Languages

Unioninkatu 40, Box 24

University of Helsinki, Finland 00014