English vs. American English – What’s the Difference?
1. The Rhotic Accent
How exactly then have our accents diverged since the Boston Tea Party? Many books have been written about the precise phonetic details of different English dialects, but for now I’ll stick with just one: rhoticity. If you have a “rhotic accent”, that means you pronounce the letter “r” every time it’s written, and most American dialects (along with Irish and Scottish ones) remain fully rhotic. In England, on the other hand, most of us at some point in the last few hundred years stopped pronouncing the letter “r” when it comes before a consonant (or is at the end of a word). For example in my own name, George, which I pronounce like the word “jaw” with an extra “j” sound on the end, no “r” to be found. In most parts of England (the main exception being the West Country), people pronounce “father” identically to “farther”, “pawn” identically to “porn”, and “panda” identically to “pander”, while to most Americans and Canadians those word pairs are all distinct. Non-rhotic accents can be found outside England too, particularly in places that we colonised more recently than North America like Australia and New Zealand. They can be even found in a small number of places in the U.S., most famously in Noo Yawk. But rhoticity remains one of the clearest, most prominent dividing lines between different varieties of English.
2. Vowel Sounds
Vowel sounds have shifted a fair bit over the years. In many cases sounds which used to be pronounced differently are now pronounced the same, or vice versa, but the merger or split only happened on one side of the Atlantic. I pronounce “cot” very differently from “caught”, but to many Americans they’re homophones. Similarly with “merry”, “marry”, and the name “Mary”, which are three distinct words in British speech, but sound the same in most American accents. In the other direction, I’d pronounce “flaw” identically to “floor” (there’s that lack of rhoticity again), but in American English those words are usually separated not just by an “r” but by two noticeably different vowel sounds.
3. Vocabulary
Where things start to get really confusing is with vocabulary, and I’m not just talking about slang. In Britain the Royal Mail delivers the post, while in the U.S.A. the Postal Service delivers the mail. Confusing, huh? Many of our vocabulary differences are totally arbitrary: if I did something on Saturday or Sunday, I'd say that I'd done it at the weekend, whilst an American would talk about having done it on the weekend. Other differences allow for extra shades of meaning: Americans only talk about being “in the hospital”, whilst British English retains a distinction between being “in the/a hospital”, which just means you're literally inside the hospital building, and “in hospital“, which heavily implies that you're in the hospital as a patient. It's like the difference between being “in school” and “in a school”… except Americans use the word “school” slightly differently too. In the U.S., “school” refers to any educational establishment including college, whilst in the U.K. it's only used to refer to primary and secondary education: the school that you do before going to “uni”, a British abbreviation for “university” that Americans don’t use. To add to the confusion, “public school” means something completely different here; for historical reasons a “public school” in the U.K. is a type of very expensive and exclusive private school, whilst a free, government-funded school (what Americans call a public school) is a “state school.” Do you follow? If you’re from America, you may have raised an eyebrow at my frequent use of the word “whilst” in this article. This word sounds very archaic and old-timey to American ears, but it lives on in the U.K. as a synonym of “while”. The verb “to reckon” is also alive and well in the British Isles, while in the U.S. it’s not really used anymore, except stereotypically by rural moonshine-drinking folks from the South: ”I reckon this here town ain’t big enough for the both of us!” Then again, I find it weird when Americans say “I wish I would have”. This construction sounds just plain wrong to me. In England we say “I wish I had”. Where do you go to buy alcohol? In the U.S. it's probably a liquor store, but in Blighty (that means Britain) it's more likely to be at the off-licence, so named because it's licensed to sell alcohol for consumption off the premises, as opposed to a bar where you can both buy alcohol and drink it in the same building. After a visit to the off-licence (or “offy”, where I'm from), a Brit might get pissed, which means “angry” to an American but “drunk” to us. Another American synonym for “angry” is “mad”, but in the U.K. that word exclusively means “crazy” – which caused confusion recently when Bill Clinton described British politician Jeremy Corbyn as “the maddest person in the room”. In context it was clear that Clinton had meant “angry”, but many British commentators misinterpreted the statement as a comment on Corbyn's mental health.
How exactly then have our accents diverged since the Boston Tea Party? Many books have been written about the precise phonetic details of different English dialects, but for now I’ll stick with just one: rhoticity. If you have a “rhotic accent”, that means you pronounce the letter “r” every time it’s written, and most American dialects (along with Irish and Scottish ones) remain fully rhotic. In England, on the other hand, most of us at some point in the last few hundred years stopped pronouncing the letter “r” when it comes before a consonant (or is at the end of a word). For example in my own name, George, which I pronounce like the word “jaw” with an extra “j” sound on the end, no “r” to be found. In most parts of England (the main exception being the West Country), people pronounce “father” identically to “farther”, “pawn” identically to “porn”, and “panda” identically to “pander”, while to most Americans and Canadians those word pairs are all distinct. Non-rhotic accents can be found outside England too, particularly in places that we colonised more recently than North America like Australia and New Zealand. They can be even found in a small number of places in the U.S., most famously in Noo Yawk. But rhoticity remains one of the clearest, most prominent dividing lines between different varieties of English.
2. Vowel Sounds
Vowel sounds have shifted a fair bit over the years. In many cases sounds which used to be pronounced differently are now pronounced the same, or vice versa, but the merger or split only happened on one side of the Atlantic. I pronounce “cot” very differently from “caught”, but to many Americans they’re homophones. Similarly with “merry”, “marry”, and the name “Mary”, which are three distinct words in British speech, but sound the same in most American accents. In the other direction, I’d pronounce “flaw” identically to “floor” (there’s that lack of rhoticity again), but in American English those words are usually separated not just by an “r” but by two noticeably different vowel sounds.
3. Vocabulary
Where things start to get really confusing is with vocabulary, and I’m not just talking about slang. In Britain the Royal Mail delivers the post, while in the U.S.A. the Postal Service delivers the mail. Confusing, huh? Many of our vocabulary differences are totally arbitrary: if I did something on Saturday or Sunday, I'd say that I'd done it at the weekend, whilst an American would talk about having done it on the weekend. Other differences allow for extra shades of meaning: Americans only talk about being “in the hospital”, whilst British English retains a distinction between being “in the/a hospital”, which just means you're literally inside the hospital building, and “in hospital“, which heavily implies that you're in the hospital as a patient. It's like the difference between being “in school” and “in a school”… except Americans use the word “school” slightly differently too. In the U.S., “school” refers to any educational establishment including college, whilst in the U.K. it's only used to refer to primary and secondary education: the school that you do before going to “uni”, a British abbreviation for “university” that Americans don’t use. To add to the confusion, “public school” means something completely different here; for historical reasons a “public school” in the U.K. is a type of very expensive and exclusive private school, whilst a free, government-funded school (what Americans call a public school) is a “state school.” Do you follow? If you’re from America, you may have raised an eyebrow at my frequent use of the word “whilst” in this article. This word sounds very archaic and old-timey to American ears, but it lives on in the U.K. as a synonym of “while”. The verb “to reckon” is also alive and well in the British Isles, while in the U.S. it’s not really used anymore, except stereotypically by rural moonshine-drinking folks from the South: ”I reckon this here town ain’t big enough for the both of us!” Then again, I find it weird when Americans say “I wish I would have”. This construction sounds just plain wrong to me. In England we say “I wish I had”. Where do you go to buy alcohol? In the U.S. it's probably a liquor store, but in Blighty (that means Britain) it's more likely to be at the off-licence, so named because it's licensed to sell alcohol for consumption off the premises, as opposed to a bar where you can both buy alcohol and drink it in the same building. After a visit to the off-licence (or “offy”, where I'm from), a Brit might get pissed, which means “angry” to an American but “drunk” to us. Another American synonym for “angry” is “mad”, but in the U.K. that word exclusively means “crazy” – which caused confusion recently when Bill Clinton described British politician Jeremy Corbyn as “the maddest person in the room”. In context it was clear that Clinton had meant “angry”, but many British commentators misinterpreted the statement as a comment on Corbyn's mental health.
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