Americanization has been described as one of the major sociocultural processes of language change currently affecting varieties of English worldwide; it is generally linked to the post-World War II rise of the United States to global superpower status in political, military, economic, and cultural terms. Owing to their immediate geographical proximity, the Bahamas always had closer demographic, cultural, and institutional links with the North American mainland than other British colonies. The present paper applies the notion of epicentral influence, in the sense of a regionally dominant model influencing developments in neighboring areas, to Bahamian-American linguistic relations and attempts to disentangle global from epicentral American influence. It considers not just standard Bahamian English but also Bahamian Creole, all levels of language, diachronic and synchronic data, and corpus findings as well as attitudinal studies and discusses the theoretical and methodological implications of the Bahamian data for the epicentre idea.

中文翻译：

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震中模式和美国对巴哈马英语的影响

美国化被描述为目前影响全球英语品种的语言变化的主要社会文化过程之一。它通常与二战后美国在政治、军事、经济和文化方面的全球超级大国地位的崛起有关。由于地理位置紧邻，巴哈马与北美大陆的人口、文化和制度联系总是比其他英国殖民地更密切。本文将震中影响的概念，在影响邻近地区发展的区域主导模型的意义上，应用于巴哈马-美国的语言关系，并试图将全球与震中美洲的影响分开。它不仅考虑标准的巴哈马英语，还考虑巴哈马克里奥尔语，所有级别的语言，