AMERICAN ENGLISH AND AMERICANNATIONAL CHARACTER

This paper discusses how American English reflects American national character. It emphasizes that language plays a crucial role in conveying national character. Then it analyzes the typical cases selected from many aspects of American life, including lexicons, slangs, proverbs, slogans, quotations, advertising and news English. From these familiar cases, we can see American English reveals that Americans love liberty and equality, pioneering and inventive traits, and worship materialism and money. In the end, the paper concludes that language is the best tool to recognize national culture, especially national character, which forms in the course of the development of a nation. There is no doubt that national character enables us to understand the background of language and master a language better.