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The American linguist O. F. Emerson maintains that
American English had not had time to break up into widely diverse
dialects and he believes that in the course of time the American
dialects might finally become nearly as distinct as the dialects in
Britain. He is certainly greatly mistaken. In modern times „dialect
divergence cannot increase. On the contrary, in the United States,
as elsewhere, the national language is tending to wipe out the
dialect distinctions and to become still more uniform.
Comparison of the dialect differences in the British Isles and
in the USA reveals that not only are they less numerous and far
less marked in the USA, but that the very nature of the local
distinctions is different. What is usually known as American
dialects is closer in nature to regional variants of the literary
language. The problem of discriminating between literary and
dialect speech patterns in the USA is much more complicated than
in Britain. Many American linguists point out that American
English differs from British English in having no one locality
whose speech patterns have come to be recognised as the model
for the rest of the country.

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