Purists have long decried the creeping influence of American slang on language in Britain, blaming Hollywood and more recently YouTube.
Awesome, playdate, fries, “like” as a filler word, my bad and gotten have all set traditionalists’ teeth on edge.
All is not lost, however. British English is fighting back and being adopted across the Pond, thanks to Generation Z’s liking for television shows including Love Island and Adolescence.
Bonkers is the fastest-growing British slang word in the U.S., according to new analysis, with queue, wonky and cheeky also finding favor.
British programs are increasingly popular in America among Gen Z, those aged around 13 to 28, and “Britishcore”—a celebration of the more mundane aspects of British life—was a viral social media trend last autumn.
Joint research by academics at Northern Arizona University and Babbel, a language learning platform, has tracked the impact of different words or phrases, using a database of five million transcribed words and 1,000 hours of spoken American English.
Thanks to British influences, bonkers is now widely used in America to describe chaotic sports moments and political scandals, researchers say.
Amongst is also growing in popularity, appearing in academic writing and corporate branding.
Queue is gaining traction, instead of “line”, due largely to a queue feature on Netflix that allows users to organize videos they plan to watch. The word has spread to capture the pastime at which British people excel, patiently standing to wait their turn in restaurants and shops.
Cheeky, rather than meaning impudence, is being adopted in America to indicate playful indulgence, as in a “cheeky pint”. And cheers, rather than just being the name of an American TV show and something to say when proposing a toast, is now being used in America to mean “thank you”, even in professional email sign-offs.
Maths rather than math is increasingly popular in U.S. academic circles due to international collaborations and has been familiarized through social media study influencers, like Ruby Granger, sharing revision tips.
Other emerging Britishisms that were recorded included nutter, trousers, bugger, dodgy, kerfuffle, posh, aggro, banter, bollocks and flummox.
Esteban Touma, a language teacher at Babbel, said: “The Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw once joked that England and America are two nations separated by a common language. While slang on either side of the Atlantic evolves distinctly, the exchange of words is very much a two-way street. The prevalence of Britishisms in American Gen Z’s language is a reflection of cultural globalization, driven by media and technology. British TV shows like Love Island and global music icons like Charli XCX are doing more than entertaining, they’re exporting language and fueling cultural exchange. Streaming giants like Netflix and Apple TV have further amplified this phenomenon, bringing British shows [like the recent smash-hit Adolescence] into American dorms and homes.”
Ben Yagoda, author of Gobsmacked! The British Invasion of American English, said: “British people started complaining about Americanisms sullying the English language in the late 1700s, soon after the founding of the republic. Americans started noticing, and complaining, about Britishisms about a hundred years later—one of the first being ‘awfully,’ to mean ‘very’. Over the years, Americans adopted various British terms, including surprising ones like ‘soccer’, ‘brunch’ and ‘snog’, but the pace has really picked up in the past thirty years or so.”
Nicola Woolcock is an editor at The Times of London