Timeline for Do Americans say "don't" as often as the British?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
13 events
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| Jun 23, 2022 at 10:46 | comment | added | Stuart F | Some British dialects tend not to use "don't": many Scottish and north of English dialects use "dinnae" or "dinna" or similar, while Scots also has other, related negative constructions (often from early modern English/Scots) such as putting "not"/"no" after the verb where southern English would use "n't" forms. "gonnae no dae that", "Ah'm no happy", etc. | |
| Jun 23, 2022 at 0:04 | history | edited | Laurel♦ | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
accessible tables
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| Jun 22, 2022 at 8:16 | history | edited | CommunityBot |
replaced http://corpus.byu.edu with https://www.english-corpora.org
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| Jan 11, 2011 at 20:45 | comment | added | nohat | Well, it's hard to draw too many conclusions from this data because the British National Corpus contains data up to 1992, whereas COCA has data to 2010. Also, the spoken corpora probably weren't made from the same kinds of utterances. I think COCA's spoken corpus is mainly TV transcripts, whereas BNC's is mainly meeting minutes and lectures. | |
| Jan 11, 2011 at 20:05 | comment | added | RandomIdeaEnglish | Sorry, I'd just like to add something. I've just done a check on Google Ngram Viewer, which seems to back up your findings. In American English, and this is from books of course, 'don't' has streaked ahead since about 1980. But in British English, 'do not' is still ahead by quite a margin. Fascinating how we've gone for 'don't' big time when it comes to speaking, but are reluctant to use it in print, whereas Americans seem to have gone the other way. | |
| Jan 11, 2011 at 19:58 | comment | added | RandomIdeaEnglish | Thanks for all your work, Nohat, my question was exclusively about spoken English, as I said, on TV and in films. In which case, if I'm reading your figures correctly, Americans don't seem to use 'don't' nearly as much as us when speaking, but use it rather more than us in print. I know that some people in the UK (but not me) consider contractions inappropriate for the printed word. So I think one way or another you've answered my question. Thanks. | |
| Jan 11, 2011 at 19:52 | vote | accept | RandomIdeaEnglish | ||
| Jan 11, 2011 at 2:29 | comment | added | Pekka | @nohat brilliant answer, +1. @treeface out of curiousity, can you make an example of such a localized construction? | |
| Jan 11, 2011 at 0:52 | comment | added | treeface | It's also possible that the higher incidence in BrE comes about from popular localized constructions that often use the word "don't". | |
| Jan 10, 2011 at 20:26 | history | edited | nohat | CC BY-SA 2.5 |
deleted 3 characters in body
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| Jan 10, 2011 at 20:25 | history | edited | Kosmonaut | CC BY-SA 2.5 |
Typo correction
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| Jan 10, 2011 at 20:16 | comment | added | ghoppe | Brilliant, backing up your answer with statistics. +1 | |
| Jan 10, 2011 at 19:10 | history | answered | nohat | CC BY-SA 2.5 |