British English vs. North American English, “Off Something” vs. “Off of Something”

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Yes, hello. Hi.

Hi, who’s this?

This is Jeff calling from Virginia Beach area.

What would you like to talk with us about, Jeff?

Well, in a nutshell, I married a foreigner who originally from Barcelona, but grew up speaking British English.

And from my accent, you can tell I didn’t.

I grew up in Ohio, and right away, my wife, she would pick out this weird, I don’t know, to her, a quirk that Americans would say, and they would say this off of combination thing.

For example, take the book off of the table, or let’s get off of the highway.

And because I’m a husband who doesn’t like conflict, especially over grammar issues, I just kind of eliminated that of from my way of speaking.

And now when Americans say it, it just kind of glares at me that it just sounds off to me now, too.

When somebody says, oh, yeah, we need to get off of the road or get it off of the table.

Why do we say of?

Is that even grammatically correct?

Is that wrong?

And we have that double preposition thing in American English.

So that’s my question.

Oh, yeah.

So she noticed because she had the dialect conflict between the British dialect that she learned and your dialect.

And that’s natural when two dialects come together.

I always envision them like two thunderstorms approaching.

Each one of them, the lightning striking and the thunder booming and the rain falling.

And eventually they settle out and there’s no difference between the two.

And you can’t even tell there was ever a storm.

And it sounds like that’s where you’re headed with your language’s differences as you each reconcile your own with the other.

So just to reiterate here, the American English speaker would say, I drove off of the freeway.

And the British English speaker would say, I drove off the motorway.

Right?

Right.

Right.

The motorway.

Exactly.

And it’s just simply a dialect difference.

That is it.

And there’s no one better than the other.

And this is a really good place to point out that all of the varieties of English spoken everywhere in the world are all descendants of other Englishes that no longer exist.

And none of them are the original, including the British English spoken now, is not the original or the first one or the best one or the main one or the most perfect one.

And so it’s not like British English is the parent and American English is the child.

The British English spoken today is also a child of another English.

And it is also a sibling, just like American English, of an originator.

So it is easy for people to get kind of snooty about that and forget that British English has changed dramatically over the centuries, just like American English has.

And it is not somehow the purest or best form.

So this is a really good place to point that out.

But while we’re talking about these preposition differences, I want to give you some other differences that you can also be irritated about if you’d like.

Yeah.

He said he was conflict avoidant now.

What the heck.

Americans are more likely to say in back of the house.

And British English speakers are unlikely to say that.

They’re more likely to say behind the house.

American English speakers might say, I live on Main Street.

British English speakers might say, I live in the high street.

But by and large, prepositionally, the two main forms of the two dialects spoken on each side of the Atlantic are astonishingly alike, given how long they’ve had to diverge.

But it’s quite easy to make a big show out of how different they are and to parade around those differences as being a really big deal.

And except in the classroom, it’s not really that big a deal.

Yeah. Yeah, I agree.

Take care and give our best to your wife.

All right. Thanks for having me.

Sure. Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

We’d love to hear about your experience in a bilingual household or a multilingual household.

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