Why do we call it English when we live in America?

When I was growing up, I often wondered about this question.  Obviously, we speak English because of our cultural roots as a British colony.  Since we didn't create our own culture right off as soon as we began settling this continent, we borrowed everything from our British progenitors. This included the language.  Of course, the language was called English because it came from England.  Those first few colonists didn't have any issues with this fact.  They were quite happy being British subjects.  But fast forward 150 years. 1776, the now American colonists decide they don't like living under British rule anymore and start a little thing we now call the American Revolutionary War.  Turned out great for us, but our language was still English, even if we were now Americans.  Why didn't we change our language then?  Probably because we were used to it by that point, and we still wanted to be friends with the English, so we kept speaking English.  Of course, that may just be a bit of revisionist history to fit my argument.  In the end, the short answer is we inherited this language from our ancestors and just don't feel the need to mess with it.

But, just as Darwin discovered with species, languages evolve over time.  This is particularly audible if you were to talk to someone from England, or even Australia for that matter, despite the fact that we have a common language base.  If any American were to go to England today, having a conversation with anyone from across the pond would not be as easy as talking to your next door neighbor.  We all speak the same language, but the words have evolved different meanings for the different cultures.  One word here might mean something different in London, and something entirely different from either of those in Melbourne.  This is even true just in America.  People from the northeast don't talk the same way as people from the south or people from the west coast.  Dialects and accents make the minor variations in the English language spoken in those areas seem even more different than they really are.  I would say that we're getting close to having our own language that is completely different from English, and that given enough time, there could be multiple American languages from the different parts of the country.

That is to say, if we don't dumb our language down before that can happen.  The advent of cellular phones, and more specifically, text messages has begun a downward spiral for our language.  Text messages limit the number of characters you can apply to any certain message, causing them to be a forced length. That in turn caused people to begin to abbreviate their words in order to fit more words into a single message.  This in it of itself would not have been a bad idea if it had stayed in the realm of the text message world. Unfortunately, it didn't.  The youth of today found it so easy that they began to use the abbreviations and acronyms in their every day life, and worse, in their school work.  They seemed to think that it was acceptable to turn in work that looked and read like a text message, missing key words to help understanding and using the abbreviations for the real words.

I find this to be wholly unacceptable.  Maybe it's just me.  The English language is such a diverse and expressive language, when it is learned and used properly.  Authors through the course of time have used it so eloquently. Shakespeare, Emerson, Whitman, Hemingway, Bronte, Morrison, and more contemporary authors like King, Crichton, and Grisham all use the English language to evoke certain emotions from the words they choose.  Some of my favorite books, like Watership Down, by Richard Adams, and the historical fiction writings of Jeff Shaara, while not often considered "classics" all draw me to them through the words they use.  They pull me into the story so that I can almost see what's happening in my head as I read.  The words are powerful.  The words mean something.  I often read these books over and over because of the way they make me feel.  Poetry often creates some of the strongest emotions we can have.  And they're just words put together in different, often creative and unique ways.  To see the English language eviscerated and emaciated like it is in text usage is appalling. I even find calling it a "language" unto itself, which we often do, to be an assault on the term "language."

It is, though, almost becoming it's own language.  If you don't know the meanings, you can't understand it anymore than you could understand Russian or Swahili without knowing those words and their meanings. And it seems like we're trending in the direction of text language being the dominant language, as more of the newer generation of kids prefer that to regular English.  I even worry about where this kind of perversion will take us.  If we're not going to be smart enough to handle using our language properly, and have to dumb it down so that we can text it to our friends, what does that mean for our future?  With all the social media and reality TV, we believe that it's better to be Snooki than to be Einstein.  It's only a matter of evolution before American society ceases to be a world power and we become the laughing stock.  We already see it in our education levels.  We're not first in education when compared to the rest of the world.  We're not even second.  Often we're 15th or worse, and this is especially true with math and science.  And we all know what happens when you forget your history (we repeat it, for those that don't know their history).  And I don't think we're even first in teaching English, and there's only a handful of countries that speak English as their primary language.  We're on a collision course with society imitating art.  It's only a matter of time before we end up like this...