“In the UK, we call this season ‘autumn,’” TikToker Amber Kacherian began her viral video, walking alongside some auburn leaves.
She (correctly) said the name stems from “the Latin word ‘autumnus’, which means ‘harvest season’,” while the UK national anthem rang out in the background.
Then, she superimposed her face onto a lolloping cartoon character, and her accent became American. “We call it fall because leaf fall down!” she exclaimed, highlighting the difference between UK and US terms for the season.
It’s a funny video, but if dictionary Merriam-Webster is to be believed, it’s not quite accurate.
After all, not only does “spring” (“leaf spring up!” if we want to follow the creator’s logic) very much exist in British English, but “fall” wasn’t actually an Americanism word to start with.
So where does the term ‘fall’ come from?
“Fall” is not a term that independently sprung up in American English, it was actually born in the UK.
Merriam-Webster writes that prior to the 1300s, English speakers didn’t even use the word “autumnus”, which later became autumn.
Instead, we used “harvest”, which became confusing as it was hard to tell when the word referred to the yearly reaping of grain, fruit, and veg, versus the season.
Over time, Merriam-Webster adds, poets’ fascination with “the fall of the leaves” in autumn turned “fall” into another way of saying autumn by the 1600s.
This was around the same time English colonists arrived in what we now call the US.
After a while, the cultures diverged so much that “fall” became entirely American by the 1800s, while “autumn” was primarily associated with British English.
“A friend has pointed out to me the following remark on this word: ‘In North America the season in which this [the fall of the leaf] takes place, derives its name from that circumstance, and instead of autumn is universally called the fall’,” lexicographer John Pickering wrote in 1816.
Americans use an older British ‘r’ sound, too
Some people say that, because American English speakers split off from British ones when they first moved to the States, they preserved parts of the language and accent that have since been lost in the UK.
Supposedly, that means they sound more like Shakespearean Brits than most English people.
While the BBC says it’s a bit more complicated than that, they do concede the American use of “r” in words like “card” and “water” (linguists call pronouncing every “r” sound like this “rhoticity”) is likely one such holdover.
Marisa Brook, assistant professor of linguistics at Saint Mary’s University in Halifax, told the BBC: “Many of those immigrants came from parts of the British Isles where non-rhoticity hadn’t yet spread.”
“The change towards standard non-rhoticity in southern England was just beginning at the time the colonies became the United States,” she added.