American and British English differences

[bagzi94]

Hi! How are you? I would like to learn British English,
so, for start, I need to know differences.
Are you willing to write me some?

PS You can also tell me something about Australian.

[birdeen's call]

This is a very broad subject. You may want to start with American and British English differences - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[Rover_KE]

Try entering your thread title into the google search box, bagzi.

You'll find links to more information than you probably want.

Good luck with that.

Ask us again if you have any more specific questions.

Rover

[Mehrgan]

Though this may not be a good idea for a start, but have a look at www.effingpot.com.

I very much like it!

[davilan]

Actually, I recently put "British vs American English into yahoo com The wikipedia links that came up and the links inside the articles are quite excellent and extensive. I copied them into a word doc that filled 250 pages which I use as a guide for teaching English teachers some of the differences.


American and British are two different languages with the same roots


Sorry I had to remove the links in order to post

[bagzi94]

... Please, delete this message.

[birdeen's call]

American and British are two different languages with the same roots

This is not a generally accepted statement. It has its supporters, but many people consider AmE and BrE dialects of the same language.

[davilan]

They are defiantly not the same in my opinion. American became it's own language by necessity-American life from the moment the first English speakers arrived-forced the language to deal with words and expressions not available in the original English language.

Adding to that how many other modern languages are contributors to American and how many words are 100% attributed as only America and it's easy to see how in the last 3-400 years the languages have evolved into not dialects but different languages with the same roots. Each has its own set of rules. Very much as British English is derived from Germain roots, American is derived from, not a dialect of, British roots.

[davilan]

"This is not a generally accepted statement. It has its supporters, but many people consider AmE and BrE dialects of the same language"

by the way-are any of those people on the American side of the pond?

[birdeen's call]

They differ and they have the same roots, that's indisputable. The problem is the definitions of language and dialect. Some say that to be a distinct language, a dialect must become incomprehensible enough to other speakers. Most dialects of BrE and AmE are almost perfectly mutually intelligible, so, if we accept mutual intelligibility as the main criterion, we end up with two dialects, not two languages.

There are many other criteria and depending on which we choose to use we will get different classifications. For example, BrE and AmE are spoken in different states, have their standardized (to some extent) forms that differ from each other, and are prestigious enough, which could indicate that they're actually different languages.

It's all about definitions.