India, July 26 -- George Bernard Shaw was spot on when he declared that the US and England are two countries separated by a common language. But so too was Henry Higgins. In My Fair Lady, commenting on their accent,he said "In America they haven't spokenit for years". A recent essay by David Robson on the BBC website to mark the sestercentennial anniversary of American independence explains how American English was born. It's a fascinating story. Did the founding fathers of the US insist on a new way of speaking? It seems Thomas Jefferson did. In August 1813 he wrote: "So great growing a population, spread over such an extent of country, with such a variety of climates, of productions, of arts, must enlarge their language, to make it answer its purpose of embracing all ideas, the new as well as the old. The new circumstances under which we are placed, call for new words, new phrases, and for the transfer of old words to new objects". By this time, however, the British were complaining about American contamination of the purity of English. As early as 1756 Samuel Johnson defined theAmerican "dialect" as "a tract (trace)of corruption". Thus, Americans began to call football "soccer" and autumn "fall". But both of those, incidentally, were older English words that had fallen into disuse in the mother country. That's also true of gotten, which Americans prefer to the British got. Many of the other words which the Americans coined came from Algonquian languages such as skunk, raccoon,chipmunk, moose, opossum and caribou. In many instances, the Americans gavea distinctly Yankee flavour to theirchoice of terminology. Bills instead of bank notes, mad for angry, smart for clever, pet to mean stroke, and sick to describe a generalstate of illness rather than a stomach upset. Ask a New Yorker for a jug ofwater and he's bound to respond, "Do you mean a pitcher?" Noah Webster in the 18th century took the process of Americanisation of English one step further by changing the spelling. His justification was simple: "As an independent nation, our honour requires us to have a system of our own, in language as well as government." Of course, he spelt honour as honor. In fact, he's responsible for omitting the u in favo(u)r, and for the single l in words like "traveled" as well as the conversion of "draught" to "draft". To him is also attributed the American spelling of centre, i.e., "center". It took the American people a while to accustom themselves to Webster's spellings. But they did. Today, the spellcheck on American computers imposes their preferred spelling over your correct English one. I spend a lot of my time amending what the computer has irritatingly but unstoppably done. Today when an American travels his luggage is his baggage and what adorns his legs is pants not trousers. This is liable to be misunderstood by the British. For them baggage has a very different meaning and pants are usually worn inside your trousers. Robson points out that the American term "dude" - which we often use in India - refers to an American-born man who has failed to embrace his American identity and, instead, aspires to British fashion and language. So, be careful the next time you call someone a dude. It's not what you think it is. It's not smart to be one. It's a distinctly pejorative term. So, as the US marks its 250th independence anniversary, you could ask if Jefferson was right when he hoped that as American English gained strength "it's new character may separate it in name as well as in power from the mother-tongue". The answer isn't straight forward. American English is different. There's no doubt about that. Both in words and their pronunciation. But the British can easily understand what the Yanks are saying. To that extent, Jefferson did not succeed. That suggests it's more a dialect than a different language. Would you disagree?...