Letter: Uncle Sam's takin' us over, y'all

Letter: How rereshing was Matt Lakin's contribution (April 4) on the corrosion of our language by US imports.

On an almost daily basis new evidence emerges. Not only are good English words being usurped by spurious American ones, but our pronunciation is gradually becoming their pronunciation.

• Read Matt Lakin's letter here

Linguists will tell us that this is nothing more than evolution of the language. It is nothing of the sort. Evolution concerns our language being added to, not changed.

No, what we have here is the UK tongue being hijacked, not evolving. For the life of me I cannot understand why this is being accepted.

Paradoxically, it is very often those people who loudly proclaim that the EU or immigration is undermining the British identity who are most guilty of this foreign usage and are content, even eager, to see the UK become a pointless little appendage of the USA. Neither is it just at street level that the problem lies.

Hardly a week goes by without some new government initiative (in education or health or law and order or whatever), being announced and preceded by the phrase "American style".

We blindly stumble after the Americans in everything from the spoken word, to attitudes to domestic issues, to international crises. This is particularly questionable when you bear in mind that America has one of the highest rates of social problems per head of population in the western world.

Leaving aside the pros and cons of EU membership, we should not forget that we are Europeans, not Americans, the "special relationship" is a dead duck and we should stop hanging on to Washington's ankles. It is degrading.

Ian Liston

Wellington