The English language is in danger. It is being invaded and infiltrated by the vulgar slang, the horrid jargon, the grammatical errors and the nasal pronunciation of the United States. Such is the nightmare of those crumbling remnants of the British establishment who still prize the affected tones of what was once termed the Oxford accent, B.B.C. English, the public-schools’ drawl. Today Oxford students tend to sound like the provincial chemists they are, the B.B.C. weather forecasts are given out by an entertaining Irishman from County Antrim, and even England’s expensive elite boarding schools are more concerned with examination results than with ensuring that their pupils acquire porcelain vowels and effortlessly slurred consonants. Even the younger members of the British royal family have modified their speech away from the exclusive, hierarchical manner of the old English upper classes. Queen Elizabeth II is the last British monarch to speak like the Queen of England to her subjects. Charles, Prince of Wales has already implicitly indicated that when he succeeds to the throne he will speak as King of the British people.

All these changes are part of the slow social revolution that has transformed Britain during the last fifty years and leveled the former pinnacles of the English aristocracy, if not to a broad flat democratic American plain, at least to a manageable hummocky rubble of boulders and moraines. It is doubtful whether the Americans were, in any way responsible for this process. Rather, the British have to thank Marshall Goering’s World War II Luftwaffe, which forced people of all classes to cower together in common air raid shelters, and the postwar provision of free false teeth under socialized medicine that for the first time enabled the English lower classes to express themselves clearly.

The formerly toothless poor could now insist on being listened to and demotic speech became increasingly acceptable. The Americans are not to blame, but those English people who are nostalgic for their old ways of speaking find America a convenient scapegoat because it is rich, powerful, and an endless source of appallingly bad television programs.

The English spoken by the majority of urban, white Americans is far more homogeneous than is the case in Britain itself, and differs very little from standard British English. The average middle-class English traveler has far less trouble communicating with his counterparts in Chicago, San Francisco, or H.L. Mencken’s Baltimore than with his fellow citizens from Glasgow, Liverpool, or Newcastle, and a cultured English visitor to the wilder parts of Yorkshire is still advised to take an interpreter with him. By contrast the differences between the standard forms of American and British English are trivial and so well-known that they form the basis of aged jokes that circulate on both sides of the Atlantic. In one such jocular tale an English visitor to an American office, either naively or cunningly, depending on who is telling the joke, asks a typist if she has a “rubber,” a word that in England signifies an eraser, but in America refers to what the French term a capote Anglaise and the English call a French letter.

Such differences are no more than jokes, for the interchange of preachers and professors, of books and lecturers, of words and wordmongers across the Atlantic is both frequent and easy. As a speaker and writer of Welsh English, my main worry when writing for American publishers is that I do not understand the American system of punctuation, but then I do not understand the British system either. I was absent from school on the day that they did punctuation. American intellectuals, far from being either coarse or jargon-ridden, tend rather to be shocked by the Rabelaisian freedom of utterance of their English female colleagues and by the fog of meaningless verbiage that fills the speech of England’s Francophile intelligentsia, who even now continue to ponder the obscurities of Levi-Strauss, Lacan, Althusser, and Poulantsas. Like their wives, they always appear dressed in last year’s French fashions. It is only the Americans who have resisted such nonsense, albeit mainly because they know no French. Americans alone remain the true heirs and guardians of the English tradition of blunt, clear, down-to-earth empiricism.

The one place where a major difference between the two cultures may be seen is the television screen. Sad to say, British television is 70 percent rubbish but then, for me at least, American television is at least 95 percent rubbish. I have often sat in American motel rooms before a television set with ten different channels and no choice. Americans, by contrast, are amazed at the relatively high quality of British television. It is, though, a false comparison. Europeans tend to see the very worst of American television, which is often dumped in European markets below cost after it has made its main profit in America. American television stations, however, on the rare occasions they buy abroad, will only buy high quality British television programs, particularly if they also have a strong historical dimension. As a people without a history, Americans have to buy it where they can. Until very recently American broadcasting companies have been unwilling to purchase British television soap operas, even though they are sufficiently banal to appeal to the Australians and the Bavarians. The other side of this prejudice is that the British ridicule any film in which an actor with an American accent is cast as a noted European such as Napoleon or Mozart. The Britishers see history, even Corsican or Austrian history, as their own cultural monopoly. In consequence American popular culture is made to look even more crass than it really is, while the Europeans, and especially the British, deceive the Americans into paying deference to a cultural superiority that is in large measure bluff.

The current British concern about the state of the language is misplaced, for Britain’s real problems lie in the slow collapse of its system of highschool education, where standards have already dropped sharply and are likely to slump even more. Britain’s schools are in decline not because the Britishers have imitated the equivalent great American disaster but because of the power wielded by Britain’s own ignorant and envious left-wing egalitarians. Similarly, the problem the British will face in the future when innumerable satellite television stations beam abominations into the very heart of their homes will be the fault not of the Americans but of advertisers who are only willing to sponsor programs aimed at viewers with a mental age of less than ten. It is high time that the British ceased to see their American cousins as the villains responsible for undermining the house of intellect and came to see them as what they are: fellow victims of the equality-mongers.