Oceanic

There's always been the problem of pitting American English against British English as if the two were like Hokkien Chinese and Cantonese Chinese, or French and Spanish. People are mentally fragile when it comes to arguments about dialect, basilect and acrolect.

This need not be so. Eventually, one suspects, we'll all be speaking trans-Atlantic English with trans-Pacific modifications. And it would be so much more beautiful if we adopted trans-Indianic cadences.

By this I mean that the dialect with the spectrum ranging from New England to Old England will be modified by the tendencies evinced from California to Japan and South-East Asia, hopefully with elements of the many syntaxes and accents found from Johannesburg and up and across the Old Ocean to Bombay and back down to Singapore.

Such is the beauty of English; it is so plain and yet so protean that it can easily be made beautiful in many ways — it is polymorphically crystalline when viewed in some ways. Will we end up speaking American English? Or will American English have become un-American by then? After all, look what happened to British English, that mysterious and imaginary animal.