Both Thomas Jefferson and Noah Webster were totally convinced that American English would evolve into a completely separate language. Towards the end of the 19th Century, the English linguist Henry Sweet predicted that, within a century, “England, America and Australia will be speaking mutually unintelligible languages, owing to their independent changes of pronunciation” (as it has turned out, with the development of instantaneous global communications, the different dialects seem likely to converge rather than diverge, and American economic and cultural dominance is increasingly apparent in both British and, particularly. Australian speech and usage).