Inroduction

The actuality of the work is to consider the distinctive elements of the American English variant in the context of the language system which was proposed by Webster.
The aim of the work is to identify the peculiarities of American English, as well as the differences in the vocabulary and phonetics of the American variant of English that was created by Webster and Mencken.
The practical value of the work. This work can be used as a basis for further scientific research, as well as a teaching material.
In order to achieve the goal, it is necessary to solve the following tasks:

1. 
   To study the process of formation of the American variant of English.
   
2. 
   To study the state of the problem in scientific and methodological literature.
   
3. 
   To analyze the differences at the phonetic and lexical-semantic levels.
   

The structure of the work consists of two chapters, introduction and conclusion with bibliography.

CHAPTER I. AMERICAN ENGLISH AS A VARIANT OF ENGLISH

1. History of the development of American English

The first attempts to colonize North America were made as early as the 16th century, but they did not lead to permanent settlements. It was not until 1606 that the colony of Dmeystown in the southern part of North America (present-day Virginia) was established. This colony enjoyed the patronage and support of the English crown as early as 1619 a Dutch ship brought their slaves

• 
  African blacks. This was the beginning of the slave trade in America. The Virginia colony was the first point in the New World where the English language was established; but it did not play a significant role in its spread.
  

In 1620 the ship Mayflower departed from the coast of England with Englishmen - men, women, and children - who belonged to the religious branch of the Puritans.¹
The inhabitants of the two settlements had different linguistic traditions. The Jamestown colonists came mainly from the western part of England, from such counties as Somerset and Gloucestershire, with the pronunciation characteristic of those places (the voicing of the [s] sound and the rolling pronunciation of [r] after vowels). The Plymouth colonists came from the eastern counties of England (Lincolnshire, Nottinghamshire, Essex, Kent) and London, where the accents were of a slightly different kind: the [r] sound after vowels was absent there. ²These differences continued. The speakers of the different dialects were never clear because of the constant migration of the population from the north to the south and in the opposite direction and the influx of emigrants from different countries of the world. Thus, the history of the English language in America spans three and a half centuries.
The early period (from the early 17th century to the late 18th century), which is characterized by the formation of American dialects of English, and





¹ Metcalf A. How we talk. American Regional English today. Boston New York, 2000
² Crystal D. English as a Global Language. Camb. Univ. Press, 2000 - 150
the late period (19th and 20th centuries), which is characterized by the creation of the American version of English. These periods are approximately equal in time, but by no means equal in importance.³
At the beginning of the early period, English in America basically conformed to the norms that were adopted in England in the seventeenth century. English pronunciation of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries differs considerably from that of the modern language. The changes either did not affect English in America at all or affected it to a much lesser extent. Thus, by the end of the period we are considering, significant deviations from the fraternal norms of literary pronunciation had already emerged in America.
The most important divergences are those caused by the addition of vocabulary to the English language in America.
The new conditions of life of the first English colonists in America were reflected in various neologisms of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Of note here is a common group of words denoting the natural conditions of the American continent, its flora and fauna, for example:
moose - American moose, backwoods - forest wilderness.
The other group is the vocabulary, which refers to the life of the first settlers from England to the new ways of housekeeping, etc.
corndodger - corn tortilla, coleslaw, shredded cabbage, lot - plot of land.
During the same period, the early period, a significant group of words used by the colonists appeared. The words characterized the life and way of life of the indigenous inhabitants of North America, the Indians.
For example:



³ Krapp G.R. The English Language in America. NY, 1960
moccasin, squaw, medicine-man, warpath.
The vocabulary of the English language in America was enriched in two
ways:

1. 
   through the formation of new words and stable word combinations and the reinterpretation of old ones.
   
2. 
   by borrowing words from other languages.
   

The settlers borrowed words from Native American languages to describe unfamiliar plants:

• 
  genus hazel, - persimmon.
  

They also borrowed words for animals:

• 
  raccoon, -forest marmot.
  

The words borrowed from the French language are:

• 
  prairie, a type of soup. from Dutch:
  
• 
  chalande, skiff, -sled.
  

Among the new words formed in the American colonies of England in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, most are compound words created by substantiation of word combinations of the type "adjective + noun" and "noun + noun". These transformations arose because of those words, which were part of the lexicon of the early Anglo-Saxon language.
For example: Bullfrog, "a bull whose mooing resembles the croaking of a frog. The coexistence of the old and new meanings is noted, for example, in the noun frontier, which acquired an additional meaning in America: a newly developed or sparsely populated area immediately adjacent to a desert or uninhabited area.
Based on this new meaning several compound words and set phrases emerged, in which one of the elements is frontier in its American meaning. (For example, frontierman, frontier country, frontier town).
Often the development of a new meaning of a word is conditioned by the similarity of the objects denoted by the word. For example, the English word
store, which in America has acquired the meaning "store, shop. Such reinterpretation was caused by the fact that at that time in the colonies any store by virtue of necessity was also a warehouse of goods. Hence arose the phrase keep the store - "to have a store.
A special group of words, the semantic meaning of which has undergone a complete rethinking, is singled out. For example, the process of narrowing the meaning, the English noun corn in England means any crops, and in America the word corn began to denote corn, i.e., exactly the crop, which had to be mainly cultivated by the first settlers.
This also includes cases of reinterpretation, as a result of which the connection with the original meaning was broken, and the primary meaning of the word was preserved only in the British version, such a semantic shift took place with the word lumber, which in England means "junk, garbage. But at the beginning of the XVIII century the noun lumber began to mean not only logs, planks and other objects that blocked the way to transport and pedestrians, but also timber.
Later the primary meaning was completely lost, and the word in its new meaning to a certain extent displaced the synonymous timber from American use.
One of the sources of vocabulary replenishment in this period were borrowings from other languages and, first, from the languages of the Indian tribes that inhabited North America. Here, terms denoting the flora and fauna of the American continent predominate.

2.