Having studied attitudes towards usage problems such as the notorioussplit infinitive or the ubiquitous literally inBritish English as part of my doctoral thesis, I was intrigued bythe sheer lack of scientific studies investigating such attitudes.What was even more intriguing was to discover that the same fieldand the same usage problems seem to have received a differenttreatment in the United States of America. While my search forpreviously conducted usage attitude studies in Great Britain haslargely remained fruitless, besides two notable exceptions which Iwill discuss in detail below (see Section 3), a similar search forAmerican usage attitude studies resulted in a different picture.Considerably more such studies seem to have been conducted in the USthan in Great Britain. On top of cultural and linguistic differencesbetween these two nations, it seems as if they also hold differentattitudes towards studying attitudes towards usage problems. Now thefollowing question arises: why do we find such contradictoryscientific traditions in these two countries? In this paper, I willprovide an overview of a selection of American and British usageattitude studies. Taking into account differences between theAmerican and British studies with regard to the number of usageproblems studied, the populations surveyed and the methods applied,I will attempt to capture manifestations of two seemingly divergingattitudes towards the study of usage problems. By doing so, I willprovide a possible explanation for the lack of attention being paidto usage attitudes in Great Britain.

Every now and then one stumbles across complaints about the decaying state of the English language. British English is under threat from American English. English is dying or just on the verge of drawing its last breath. Recurring allegations similar to these are made by worried, albeit self-opinionated, speakers who are not only quick to declare the time of death of English, but also to point the finger at who they think is to blame for these developments. As part of my PhD project on usage attitudes in British English, I included the somewhat general question ‘What do you think about the state of the English language?” in an online questionnaire which was completed by 230 informants from Great Britain in order to obtain an insight into commonly held beliefs about British English. This particular question generated answers from 176 informants who shared their personal beliefs, or rather fears, about the state of the English language. In this article, I would like to share some of the insights gained through the preliminary analysis of these answers and invite you to contribute by completing a survey on this topic.

Usage problems are a prickly affair. Not only are speakers' attitudes towards them divided and do they tend to fluctuate, but also the problematic statuses of alleged problems are debatable. Hence, studying usage problems sometimes feels like manoeuvring through a minefield. Stepping into the disputed terrain of language use requires a solid understanding of what the subject matter is, as well as what people think about these so-called usage problems.