Do the Brits have a corner on the grammar book market?

[bradwelljackson]

My own experience is that most of the grammar books that are published for our students are written by the Brits. This also might be the case for the grammar books that we English teachers read to brush up on our grammar knowledge. Now, my own conspiracy theory is that, long ago, the Brits started realizing that the yanks were getting a bit thick on the ground and that they would therefore subsume the English language. Such a development was, shall we say, not to their liking. They said to themselves "Those bloody Yanks! Everyone thinks that their version of English is the correct one! Who do they think they are trifling with our language?" The industrious Brits therefore decided to get a move on and started publishing grammar books in earnest in order to corner the market so that their future competitors would be left in a lurch. Now they can be more secure in the fact that their version (the original and supposed proper version) of English will reign supreme as the one learned by the world community.
So then, as conspiracy theories go, how does this one stack up?

(Looking forward to Wood and Fluff's reply as I know they will be the first to answer.)

[alexcase]

Sorry not to be able to reply in the amusing tone of the post, but...

I think it's just part of the surprisingly strong position that British publishers have in the ELT world market in general. The main reason is that American publishers can still make much more money in the US producing materials for ELLs in American schools, whereas in the UK the market for books for foreign students studying summer courses etc has always been much larger. Being geographically close to huge ELT markets like Spain and Greece probably didn't hurt, plus maybe:
- A few Commonwealth connections
- The strength of Cambridge ESOL in exams like FCE and teaching qualifications like the CELTA
- Ditto for Trinity
- The British Council
- Other support from the British government

[J.M.A.]

I suppose it's a historical reason, with the British empire and the concentration of knowledge in Cambridge and Oxford. ELT publishing in general is quite British indeed, assuming you thought it would be automatically dominated by Americans.

[woodcutter]

I find the domination of the US English market by Oxbridge publishing very odd.

However, my uni in Britain is using US published stuff with US English and US style pedantry as well. Odder.

[fluffyhamster]

I think some of it has to do with the greater amount of empirical, theory-neutral research continued in the UK in spite of the virtual hegemony achieved by Chomsky in the US and elsewhere - I mean, whilst the likes of Quirk etc were writing meaty grammars and laying the foundations for computerized corpora, it seems that practical work in America more or less ceased (for a while at least) after the likes of Fries. Not of course that UK-produced EFL textbooks have taken much account of what comprehensive grammars have to say, but certainly the average UK-produced modern pedagocial grammar/reference book seems better/more "popular" and influential than any American counterparts (with the possible exception say of Celce-Murcia & Larsen-Freeman's The Grammar Book, though that wastes a bit too much space on 'phrase structure' rules and trees IMHO).

[Heath]

Is it because the UK ones are based on corpora taken from around the world, rather than just one place?

(Perhaps it goes back to that stereotype of the US citizen not realising there's a world outside the US... in fact 95% of the world is outside the US.)

[alexcase]

"Is it because the UK ones are based on corpora taken from around the world, rather than just one place?"

Is that true? British grammar books often don't seem to know that Am Eng exists, let alone the rest of the world

[fluffyhamster]

Alex, I think it is true as Heath is suggesting that most Brit-produced grammar books take more account of other varieties of English than Yank-produced ones do. I mean, Cambridge has its CIC (Cambridge International Corpus), and I'm pretty sure that other British publishers (Longman, Oxford etc) have subcorpora of no less than tens of millions of words from at least AmE. And most of the more popular "Brit" grammar books (Swan; Eastwood; the CGE) have at least a section or chapter on the main differences between BrE and AmE. So I'd certainly question the first part of your statement that 'British grammar books often don't seem to know that Am Eng exists, let alone the rest of the world'.