WORLD REPORT PROFILE : Bill Bryson : AMERICAN LINGUIST IN BRITAIN : From a Yorkshire village, he surveys the world of English through popular books such as ‘Mother Tongue.’

The curving dales of North Yorkshire might seem an offbeat base for an American expert on the English language, but this is where Bill Bryson keeps his thesauruses, dictionaries and lexicons.

And there’s more than books for research. The 43-year-old linguist finds it intriguing that his neighbors in the Malham Valley claim they can tell by a local’s accent at which end of the 5-mile-long vale he or she grew up.

“It’s amazing,” he said. “They say they can tell the difference in the speech of a person from Leeds or Bradford, two Yorkshire cities that are almost contiguous.

“But Britain is a country incredibly replete with dialects and accents--often in very limited geographical areas.”

Accents and language have long fascinated Bryson--a tall, red-bearded and bespectacled man with a ready smile--whose books on English have been well received in Britain as well as in his native United States.

From his rural base, a 250-year-old farmhouse where he has lived with his wife and four children for the past seven years, Bryson has researched his books on travel and English, including the popular “Mother Tongue,” in which he examines how what was once Old English, a second-rate tongue of the peasantry of Britain, became the currently undisputed global language.

In the course of his writings, Bryson has explored the vast varieties of English--from American to Australian and from Creole to Cockney.

“Made in America,” a recently published sequel to “Mother Tongue,” looks at the history of the United States through the perspective of popular culture and language; it is an examination of America and the words that made it.

“Language has always fascinated me,” says Bryson, “ever since I grew up in Iowa, in Des Moines.”

Bryson’s father was a sportswriter for the Des Moines Register who became an authority on the derivation of baseball terms such as southpaw , bleachers and bullpen . “He had a marvelous library on all these words,” the son remembers. “So researching language came naturally to me.”

Following his junior and senior years at Drake University in Des Moines, Bryson backpacked to Europe, and he returned after college. He met his English wife, Cynthia, at a hospital where he worked, and eventually went to work at some London newspapers.

As a copy editor and free-lancer, he devised the “Penguin Dictionary of Troublesome Words,” a witty, sensible guide to the pitfalls of disputed usage in standard written English. Tiring of city life, he moved his family to their stone farmhouse in this Yorkshire village, which boasts a church built in 1490. “That appeals to me,” he said with a smile. “My parish church was finished before Columbus set sail for America.”

Most British critics have been receptive to Bryson’s literary efforts, though Robert Brichfield, editor of the massive Oxford English Dictionary, was somewhat abrupt in a review in the Sunday Times. “His attitude was, ‘Who does Bryson think he is?’ ” the American said.

And Prince Charles, though not directly addressing Bryson’s works, recently pronounced American English “very corrupting” and to be avoided at all costs. Americans tend to “invent all sorts of new nouns and verbs and make words that shouldn’t be,” he told the British Council, whose English 2000 project seeks to have a billion people speaking the mother tongue by the turn of the century.

“Some of the reviewers were a bit patronizing,” Bryson pointed out, “and the academics took the tack that it was an amusing book as far as it went, but . . .

“However, I always made it clear that I was not an academic but was writing a book on language meant to be breezy, and not a textbook. . . .

“Basically, I am somewhat resentful about the attitude in some circles here that America will be the death of the English language, and that the American contribution to the English language is negative.

“They may be thinking of irritating phrases like Have a nice day , but they almost never appreciate all kinds of words we have created.”

Bryson adds: “The wonderful thing about English is there’s no attempt to freeze it. There’s nothing like the French Academy to lock up the language. If we see a word like paparazzi , we use it. We like it, and it fills a need.”

What surprises Bryson is that a country as large as the United States has fewer and less pronounced regional accents than a smaller country like Britain.

“From New York state to Oregon, the Atlantic to the Pacific, people pretty much speak the same, and you have no difficulty understanding people or being understood. Here there are dozens of dialects from the Channel to Scotland. It takes some time to understand a Glaswegian accent, for instance,” he said.

“I think this standardization of our speech has a lot to do with our being a young country, establishing a common national identity with closer speech patterns. . . .

“Of course, movies, radio and television have all worked to make speech more standard. I’ve just come from Australia, and there are thousands of common American words and expressions that have entered the speech. This comes through Hollywood and TV.

“America is in the driver’s seat as far as global English goes: It’s not just English but American English.”

Bryson acknowledges, however, the frustrations of foreigners dealing with English. “Any language where a small word like fly can mean the act of flight, an insect, a theater arch, a part of your trousers or a blow in baseball is asking to be mangled.”

But the linguist argues that while standard speech enables everyone to understand each other, it necessarily reduces variety and color in language. “It would be a shame to lose regional speech,” Bryson concludes.

Now he is about to hear some variations. After 18 years in England, Bill Bryson is moving his family to America.

“They’re half English and half American, so it’s time for some American education,” he said. “We’re looking for a place in New England. I like the idea of going up the coast of Maine, listening to an old fisherman, or into our Deep South.”