What’s the Difference Between American English and British English?
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"Well, I had a flat, see? So I took a lift..."
(He hitched a ride after puncturing his car's tire, or he took the elevator from his apartment..)
That's all I remember. It continued with something in his boot (a car's trunk / footwear), and then.. who knows?
I've searched for something similar, since I have neither the vocabulary nor the talent to create something like that. Anyone here knows of something similar?
I was watching QI a couple years ago. One of the guests was a Canadian actor who had been working in the UK for years and still she still had not realized the different uses of the word.
US english: pants == trousers
That scene is meant to make the reader feel very uneasy (and it makes Harry quite depressed). But in the UK English edition, despite using the same words, the scene is far worse.
When I read that book I understood as American English.
American English, this is nearly meaningless noise. Possibly some sort of orthodontic apparatus?
Trainers == "Sneakers", casual athletic shoes.
In American English, you’re taking off their pants to expose them in their underwear.
In British English, you’re taking off their trousers to expose them in their pants.
This is just one of many weird, weird, hilarious things about the similarities and differences between the two dialects.
>US english: pants == trousers
To further complicate matters, Russian borrowed "trousers" with the meaning "underwear"
1. Turns out there’s another British slang meaning for pants.
(I rather vividly recall acting out the discovery of one's pants not containing handcuffs, and changing into some with toy handcuffs hanging out...)
If we were using a lift as in elevator we’d “get in a lift”.
:)
American banter is closer to a spectrum of what we would call chirping or passive aggression, as their culture didn't inherit a presumption of benevolence or a sense of noblesse oblige, but what I like about American culture and language is that where commonwealth deference is based on the polite presumption the person you are speaking to is secretly noble, Amercan deference respects that the person you are speaking to is plausibly equally dangerous. Having worked with a number of cross-border teams, the misunderstandings can be both comical, and irreconcilable.
Americans are very formal with very strictly observed social protocols, you're just not allowed to talk about them because then it would acknowledge class, which is the last great taboo there. If you want to see what breaking American formal rules and social protocols looks like, tease them for crossing personal boundaries or poke fun at uniquely middle class aspirations, and it can make you an enemy for life.
Recent American etiquette requires that you just "get it," in terms of who has the power in a situation because they very-officially don't use formalisms, and this tacit alignment and sensitivity to its shifts in particular is a big class signifier there. Most of them don't have a cultural abstraction for relating impersonally, where in other cultures you would acknowledge you are relating based on implied rules. Sometimes it's a relief, and sometimes the cringe is almost fatal. A personal example would be that to me, west coast culture is a lot like being around revolutionary marxists who make a point of being rude to wait staff because they think civility is bourgeois oppression, so as an outsider with normal adult boundaries, I can find it a bit alien. The culture I'm from emphasizes relating to service by learning to be worthy of it, which is probably equally bizarre to someone not familiar with that kind of interaction.
You don't get a lot of "americans are weird," perspective these days because the internet just assumes everyone has been educated by television shows that were written to entertain people, and mimicking actors is normal behaviour, but since we're into accents and culture, yes, americans can be pretty weird. :)
Somewhat recently I stumbled upon a commentary about how sometimes Russians are perceived by Amercians as almost snobby by the way they talk. As I understood it's just the result of Received Pronunciation and a pretty formal English by the book, without an actual, "live" language.
One thing I remember is what they often used "I suppose" construct in the casual speech, which rubbed off their peers.
It's not like the meaning or idea isn't communicated in North America - there they just say 'I guess' instead!
(And if the current trend continues, I suppose (!!) we'll soon be mocked for saying 'I think' instead of 'I feel like'!)
'Polite' has nothing to do with 'fear' of gunslingers.
And 'common, middle class politeness' is just a behaviour along the same way as not farting, swearing scratching your balls.
"you're just not allowed to talk about them because then it would acknowledge class"
No, nobody is worried that you're going to bring up class.
There are some PC taboos which if broken, will cause some people to be upset, but that's more or less social politics, not class.
"west coast culture is a lot like being around revolutionary marxists who make a point of being rude to wait staff because they think civility is bourgeois oppression,"
I don't want to upset you but this is a ridiculous. I respect creative contemplation, but this is nowhere near reality.
Fortunately he had a good sense of humo(u)r and forgave me.
(More hazardous than cookies and biscuits)
References: American Eng: "for the nonce" = for the moment. i.e. temporarily https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/for%20the%20nonce British Eng: "nonce" = a person who commits a crime involving sex https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/nonce
> "word coined for a special occasion," and not likely to be wanted again, 1884, from nonce "for a particular purpose" + word (n.).
And despite what you say, I still feel certain that's what's going on. The meaning is identical.
Kiwis often understand both British and American usages of words, for example calling something “completely pants” makes sense to me. Pissed can be used in either a British or American sense.
I have only ever heard of nonce in the software engineering sense, and never in the perverse sense (and I have a much wider vocabulary than most).
Pants here means trousers, following the American usage.
Usage of some individual Māori words within an otherwise English sentence is becoming more common here (cultural pride versus historical cringe), but I would expect most kiwis avoid using them if speaking to a tourist.
Anyone British working with cryptography should know it’s a number only once but, well, it can be awkward.
Later I moved to Germany, I finally figured out that zed was a Commonwealth English thing from my Canadian coworkers. None of my German coworkers could understand me when I said zee, because it sounds like "c", I guess. So I'd say tset (the German zed equivalent).
and pants to mean trousers / slacks
seems to confuse a lot of south east people
I also still chuckle every time I hear an American talk about being "bummed" (in the UK bummed=anally penetrated). So just bear that in mind next time you tell a British person "I was bummed when ...".
The common American name "Randy" is also a source of some humour (in the UK randy=horny).
We know that sense of the word in America too. I saw a friend once try to forestall that interpretation after saying "I'm Randy" by elaborating "Randy with a capital R".
Since that's a standard way to express emphasis, it did not succeed at disambiguating what "I'm Randy" meant. We all had a good laugh.
Still raises a smile when I think about it.
The phrase “to love… forcefully” was used.
> American talk about being "bummed" (in the UK bummed=anally penetrated)
But isn’t “bum a fag” still acceptable Brit phrasing?
Also reminded the Cannondale bicycle company (American) used to have a child trailer called “Little Bugger”, where in Britain bugger is principally associated with buggery, but in America, could be swapped with “ankle biter” or some such nickname for “child”.
Yes. To 'bum' something is quite different 'bum' someone! English is weird.
Well, er, I guess it depends on if you went to Eton or not…
Certain very old “public” schools[1] have a tradition of using the younger boys as a sort of personal servant for the older boys. The system is known as “fagging” and the servants/slaves are known as “fags”.
1. Where a public school in the UK is a very posh private school. It’s a public school vs a private tutor don’t ‘cha know.
This is going in a direction I wasn’t anticipating - I thought “bum a fag” would realistically mean “ask for a cigarette”.
Roald Dahl wrote extensively about "fagging" and all that went with it: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/biographyandmemoir...
:)
But even with accents, like sometimes I meet some british and complain about my italian-accent-spoken-british, does it even make sense, have you ever listened to yourself speaking italian?
I think british (londoners mostly) are mostly introverts because they really create a lot of un-existing issues for themselves it's really that sometimes you feel scared of doing anything because it could be slighly wrong
That said, I prefer British english for the most part but just being immersed in a land thousands of miles away, it is hard to not assimilate.
source: I grew up there.
Funny aside - Mom was an ESOL teacher in the US and got some funny looks from colleagues because her students had “odd” pronunciation habits. WH was the big one - in the US it’s a much softer sound than most British accents.
As a famous example, [Wearside Jack](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wearside_Jack) was narrowed down to a single suburb based on the dialect in the audio recording.
me: he's Welsh, like from Wales? that's in Europe, right?
brit: he hails from Northern England, West Yorkshire, obviously. the silent h's point to Leeds, though the scarcity of expletives suggest a flat near the Grand Theatre...294 Vicar Lane?
- Someone on twitter (can't remember the exact source)
They were all saying "prawject".
Fortunately we had good laughs over that and how I kept saying "yeah, I'm sorry" at the end of every fifth sentence.
It seems to me that for the spelling part, American and British orthography are both accepted in Canada. So we could write "center" or "centre". Also "color" or colour". Which I find amusing, as both of the British spellings come from the French -- bolstering my theory that English is just a mispronunciation of French (I jest! :P).
“Centre” indeed comes directly from French, but “colour” is itself a mutation, the French word being «couleur»
That's what the French word is now. But the French word used to be color, which is where the American spelling comes from, a late, backward-looking reform. Are you sure it wasn't colour in French when the English spelling standardized?
https://www.grammarly.com/blog/color-colour/
It seems the French spelling was "colour" at one point.
[1] I watched Star Trek: The Original Series recently and the cast's pronunciation of "sensors" with the FORCE vowel in the second syllable is really jarring. Do we know if that was an affectation or a natural pronunciation?
"launch a boo-eey"
(Brit's distinguish between "boy" and "buoy" - the latter has the same sound as in "buoyancy")
That didn't clarify much. I would pronounce "buoyancy" as if it began with "boy".
Edited: - Maybe this will help:
Anyway, if someone can't hear the difference in that sample, load it in to an audio editor, and see that (in a time / amplitude graph) the two words have different shapes.
I've not got a tool for graphing the frequency content to hand, so can't easily see how those would be distinguished.
I don't understand either. As far as I'm concerned, boy and buoy are homophones, and the first syllable of buoyancy is too.
Wiktionary agrees: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/buoy#Pronunciation
Southie Spock would have been amazing though.
Didn’t they also find it amusing how you pronounced “sorry”?
There’s an episode in South Park where Butters has a Canadian girlfriend and he tries to say it like she does.
El Salvador, the country were I lived has one of the highest consumptions of Lea and Perrins' Worcestershire Sauce.
You'll find a bottle of it on every local restaurant table and probably in most homes.
Yet no one knows how to pronounce it, most people will just call it 'Salsa Inglesa' (English Sauce), or 'Salsa Perrins' (Perrins Sauce).
I've never heard anyone say "Woustersher sauce" here.
“Wooster sauce.”
The accent here means that the phrase "pork pie" becomes "poo-wuk paaah" (stress on "poo" and "paaah") and the related steak-and-kidney-pie (which is served upside-down) was called a "babby's edd" (although I'm not sure if that's actually from nearby Bolton and is less about pronunciation I guess).
Leicester (in Leicestershire) is a larger English city with the "-cester" suffix, meaning a Roman fort. The name is used in the US as a personal or family name: Lester.
Where the pronunciation is "ch", it's also spelt that way, as in Manchester.
Which are also commonly used throughout New England in particular. Google Maps still butchers a lot of the pronunciation although it's better than it used to be. (I live about 15 minutes north of a Worcester and even closer to a Leominster which also isn't pronounced like you or apparently Google would expect.)
Well that depends... Leo-minster, Lem-stuh, Leemunster, Lomunster, Lominster, Lominser... New England vs England vs the street in Derby (Darby, not Derby), vs the posh street outside of Bristol.
Paris in France, is "Paree." Paris in Florida is "paris." Perris in California is "Pa-rees" or "Pe-riss" and sometimes "Paris" depending on the age of the person speaking, but that street named Lyon over in Hemet, just East or Perris, (He-met according to Google but Hemmet or 'emmet according to the locals) in California is Lee-on, Lee-yon, or, as one local said, "Lion, and why are you trying to be all fancy?" but is written as "Lyon" and was not named for the city in France but for the construction company that built the area.
Worcestershire is Wurstuh, Wurst-uh-shur, Wurst-uh-shuh, Wurst-er-shuh, Wor-ster-shire depending on where in the UK you are. My local UK dialect, a combination of the bad side of Grangetown outside of Carddiff (Dad) & BBC given English (Mum) so my pronunciation is, and always has been, "wurster-shuh."
Today I learned that El Salvador calls Worstershire Sauce as "Salsa Inglesa" and I shall now use that just to confuse people.
I love local pronunciations because it makes me aware that our languages are continuously evolving.
Leo-minster. That's pretty much Google.
Local is something more along the lines of leh-minster. (Or maybe Leh-minstuh though you don't really get the Southie dropped r's in this area of the state.)
Brits will say "I've lost my keys" using the present perfect to indicate something in the recent past. On the other hand, Americans will says "I just lost my keys" using the past with 'just'. These are grammatically different tenses and I think this constitutes a significant variation between the two. This is often overlooked.
Moreover, Brits will more often say "I've got" and American will more often say "I have". You can find this in ESL textbooks and by talking with people. For such a fundamental verb, I consider this a big difference.
Source: I was an ESL teacher and I have lived in both the US and the UK
You shouldn't. There might be differences in frequency of use, but "have" and "have got" are fully synonymous. Even a significant difference in how often one or the other option is chosen would only add up to a tiny difference in the languages. At best, this is a difference on the level of how Americans say "math", but the English say "maths".
> Brits will say "I've lost my keys" using the present perfect to indicate something in the recent past. On the other hand, Americans will says "I just lost my keys" using the past with 'just'. These are grammatically different tenses and I think this constitutes a significant variation between the two. This is often overlooked.
I'm not sure you've really grasped what's happening here. Either option is fine in American English. They mean different things, or more accurately they focus on different aspects of the situation. That means the choice between them is not arbitrary but heavily context-dependent.
My view of "I just lost my keys", with just normally used to mark the immediate past, is that it's a strange example of marking the recent past, because losing an object is something that might have happened in the recent past, but it's not something you're likely to recognize as happening in the recent past. If you lost your keys a minute ago, you probably don't yet know that you've lost them.[1] So while "I just ate" can only refer back maybe an hour or two, "I just lost my keys" could easily refer back a week, if e.g. it's an excuse for why I'm having logistical difficulties.
[1] Note this fully natural American usage of "you've lost your keys".
OP has correctly identified a difference, but not the exact nature of it.
In contrast to ‘just’ which can be used to mark recency in both simple past and present perfect (“I just lost my keys” vs “I’ve just lost my keys”), the present perfect does not refer to “the recent past”.
In fact, the difference between present perfect and simple past is not really a tense difference at all, but an aspectual one that marks how the speaker perceives the event. In the simple past, the event is complete, whereas in the present perfect, the event is not, either because the event is ongoing, or because it maintains a specific relevance that means we are not looking from ‘outside’ the event as a completed whole.
The difference that OP has identified is the “default understanding” of British English speakers is normally that an action is complete unless otherwise marked. “I lost my keys” in British English implies that you already have your keys back, or you’ve had new ones made, or that you no longer live in that same flat or whatever. American English does not tend to make the same assumption as strongly, and does not normally require you to use the present perfect except for emphasis.
As a very standard British English speaker I'm not convinced of this. Sure, "I've lost my keys" normally implies it's an ongoing issue, but "I lost my keys" also can unless the context says otherwise.
I actually did lose my wallet recently, and can assure you when I told my British family "I lost my wallet" their first response was to ask if I'd checked everywhere and cancelled my cards, not ask me about my new wallet!
"I've lost my wallet" might be more emphatic perhaps, but the conclusions we draw from that are dependent on context too (I've also lost my passport on a couple of occasions, but I don't think anybody's inferring I'm still troubled by a lack of passport from that phrasing!)
The ‘repeated occasions’ is a different use case - I don’t think anyone would infer you’re troubled by a lack of passport, but they might infer that you’re troubled by a tendency to mislay things!
This is an unusual viewpoint. The perfect aspect is so called for the fact that it indicates completion -- that is the literal meaning of "perfect". The fact that an action completed in the past may continue to be relevant in the present is not generally felt to indicate that such an action wasn't really completed.
> American English [...] does not normally require you to use the present perfect except for emphasis.
This just isn't true. The form in question is required to mark experiential aspect and it's also the only way of describing an action begun in the past that continues through the present ("I've been calling for 15 minutes").
Perfect forms are also required, as you note, when the speaker wishes to focus on a present situation related to an action taken in the past, as opposed to focusing on the past event itself. This is not rare.
And from the other direction, I'm not even aware that perfect forms can be used to provide emphasis.
Ideally this would be true (and it is generally true in languages which are more concrete about aspect), but that’s not how it’s used in English tense names.
For example, ‘I’ve been playing tennis since lunchtime’ is not complete, but this is a form of the present perfect. Note that there’s also no indication of whether you intend to complete the action or not, and no distinction between actions which will or can be completed and those which won’t or can’t - apart from the latter sounding ungrammatical (such as the construction ‘I’ve been knowing’ - which is common in certain dialects but violates prescriptivist grammar rules).
> This just isn't true. The form in question is required to mark experiential aspect
I think actually you’re mistaken here. In British English, it is normal to say ‘have you seen the new James Bond film?’, while in American English ‘did you see the new James Bond film?’ Is also normal (although both can be used). In most British dialects, the simple past here sounds jarring and ungrammatical.
> it's also the only way of describing an action begun in the past that continues through the present ("I've been calling for 15 minutes").
This was a clumsy statement on my part. By ‘except for emphasis’, I intended to handwave over cases where something other than the action itself is being emphasised by the speaker (ie: duration, as in your example, persistent evidence of recency, such as ‘it’s been raining [and the ground is still wet]’, or some other dialect or ‘non-standard’ use. For example, often eyewitness statements, police reports, etc. unconsciously slip into the present perfect in cases for which there’s no standard grammatical explanation).
Brit: "Not very often"
Perhaps the have a common source? Old Saxon?
In my experience, and in my own speech, it is quite common for British accents to completely replace a T with a glottal stop, unless one is being very deliberate with their speech, especially amongst younger speakers.
> In North American English, the cluster /nt/ (but not /nd/) in the same environment as flapped /t/ may be realized as a nasal flap [ɾ̃]. Intervocalic /n/ is also often realized as a nasal flap, so words like winter and winner can become homophonous.
Brit: “I’d like some uo-uh please”
American Server: “I’m sorry, could you repeat that?”
Brit: “Sorry. Uo-tuh please.”
Server: blank face
Helpful nearby American: “WADDER”
Most of the time the southern British accent is pretty comprehensible to Americans (we have more distinct vowels, the missing ‘r’s just make us sound like we’re from Boston and the glottal stops aren’t too important), but the word ‘water’ when you drop the t and the r and aspirate the w basically turns into a mush of unfamiliar diphthongs to an American ear.
Not at all. Americans reduce many /d/s and /t/s to a flap, which is much weaker than a [d]. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tap_and_flap_consonants
Dropping a /d/ or /t/ is not common at all, except in the sense that an /nt/ cluster may be replaced by a nasal flap.
Fair enough.
When most American pronounce "city", I hear "siddie". What's going on there? Is that a flap?
"Important" is an interesting word in American English. I think for many speakers including me the first /t/ is glottalized (following the general rule noted above) but for me at least there's a sound preceding the glottal sound which I don't know how to describe other than "t realization sound".
I feel like I've noticed younger (than me) American speakers omitting that first sound and just using the second (normal /n/-preceding) glottal sound. I think I've only noticed this in the Boston area where I currently live but it may be more widespread. To me it makes the pronunciation of "important" sound slightly more like how I'd expect a stereotypical southern England pronunciation to sound, except for the /r/. I have also heard Americans pronounce "important" with the /t/ realized as (I think) a flap and no glottalization, which sounds sort of affected to me, as though the speaker is trying to avoid the glottal sound.
Same with the Rs, there are many variations across different British accents.
On that note, I'm reminded of the George Bernard Shaw quote " it is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making some other Englishman despise him."
On the other hand, in American English, flapping happens pretty reliably in the appropriate environment, and it's absolutely standard and expected---any failure to flap where required will probably lead to your speech being perceived as having a British twang.
There's also a phonemic vs. phonetic thing here. In British English, a T turned into a glottal stop can still be distinguished from any other consonant, so it's still a T phonemically even though the phonetic realization has changed. In American English, flapping applies to both T and D and the result is usually indistinguishable with respect to having been originally a T or a D. In that sense American is going a step further.
I notice that I pronounce words you learn as a kid in a more Aussie style and adult words in an American style.
More interestingly to me: when I’d go back to AUS my family would laugh at how my English had become completely Americanised. But over the past decade or so other people I meet in Australia who learned I’ve been living in the States have commented, “you haven’t lost your accent!” I think what they are really saying is, “I watch a lot of TV” as there is a ton of US shows being broadcast and available online.
In British English you first apologise for it: “I’m very sorry, excuse me, would you mind, could you please pass the salt, thank you very much”
(edit: but after writing this I note that ‘would ya’ is a contraction of ‘would you kindly’, so maybe I have defeated my own point)
One would be far more likely to hear "Oi, cunt, the salt" here in Blightly than in the USA.
My non-native english usually sounds like whatever show I've been watching lately on Netflix.
Example: "So now I'm gonna go ahead and put the cake in the oven"
I'm going to go ahead and do a thing - can be used for any time (eg as a confirmation, I'm going to go ahead and mow the lawn (referring to later today at 4pm, confirming intent)). I'm fixin to do a thing - is more often a delayed action set into the future (by at least several minutes) and can be used for any longer timeframe as well, and is often less definite of a statement (fixin usually means I'm going to attempt to, if I can get around to it; or I'm going to try to get to it).
For example, they spell "Colour" the British-English way but "Analyze" the American-English way.
Our English teachers back then were highly influenced by England and the United Kingdom.
They strived for "correct" British pronunciation. They had most of their vacations (sorry, holidays) in England. Maybe Scotland.
Our school book began with "X lives in Hatfield. Hatfield is near London." One of the first words we learned was "biro". We were "pupils", not "students".
Today's English teachers have grown up with American TV series and music. I'd be surprised if that British bias still showed.
I've mostly felt that influence, as well, and I think my English is more American than British, thanks to Star Trek, Friends and the like.
Although I have once put the word "connexion" in document at work, and I'd love to use "gaol" some day before I retire. ;-)
Many international organizations¹ like the United Nations use Oxford spelling: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxford_spelling
I think it's an excellent compromise, as it looks slightly foreign to the average American and the average Brit.
¹ Oxford spelling!
I try to follow British spelling conventions, but for vocabulary, the American cultural influence is just so much greater that it becomes the natural choice.
For pronunciation, I generally tend more toward British, and I make an effort to avoid typical Swedish-English mistakes that can impact your ability to be understood (th, sh/ch, voiced s, schwa). But beyond those few items, I don’t go out of my way to avoid influences from my native tongue. Having a natural flow is more important than imitating a specific accent.
Oh you lovely wiking, you...
Still what I use.
___
1: Northern European confusenik: Born German, lived in Finland almost half my life.
What my family says to me on the phone when I call back to England: "HAHAHA! You sound so stupid. You have no hint of an English accent left at all. You are totally American now!"
He wrote in the margin: "bonnet?"
I immediately corrected it, and have since been hyper-aware of the fact that the Americans call the bonnet the "hood" and the boot the "trunk".
I asked him what the heck that meant. He said picking up girls, what do they say in America?
I said "cruisin' for babes", and we all laughed.
Verb objects (and transitive/intransitive) are another difference between the dialects. In AmE you can say “I wrote Grandma yesterday”; in BrE that would be “I wrote to Grandma yesterday”.
A lot of AmE usage is becoming commonplace in Britain thanks to the Internet, though. You’ll now see commercials in Britain that implore you to “Search ‘Fred Insurance’ for full details”. Five years ago that would have been “Search _for_ ‘Fred Insurance’”.
My girlfriend and I were watching the Harry Potter movie cast reunion, and I noticed how the younger cast members let a lot of Valley-Girl-isms slip into their speech. "So I was like" (introducing a quotation), and "totally" (meaning very, extremely), and so forth. Quite different from how I expect a British person to talk. The younger generation of Brits seem to have fully embraced what Stephen Fry called "Buffy talk, Sabrina the Teenage Witch talk" and "the language of the Sunny Delight generation": https://youtu.be/xs5fH1ECzWc (Note that Fry was specifically addressing the related phenomenon of AQI, a.k.a. "uptalk", but he diverts into things like "I was like" to introduce a quotation.)
But in many forms of commercials it's advantageous to have a short text: you can use a bigger font while paying for the same size advertisement / poster / pop-up window. So maybe that was more a "shortism" than an Americanism.
This isn't really correct. British English (of at least one prestige variety) requires an R to appear between consecutive vowels. ("Intrusive R".) So it's not that the word has an R in it that's preserved by the local phonological context when it might otherwise have disappeared. It's more that the word really has no R, because there is no such thing as a syllable-final R, but an R is generated anyway by the local phonological context. I met a Brit who refused to believe that Americans could pronounce the phrase "law and order" instead of the obligatory "law rand order".
I've always "read" that in my mind as "lawr and order". (Yes, it is of course hard to tell, since it's pronounced "lawranawrder".)
The former is more nuanced than the latter.
Interesting piece - particularly for those of us British English speakers travelling to the US for the first time.
British people will point out that even what is in this article is very superficial and wrong as a generalization to "British English". The "Leicester" accent does not use ə for the -er endings discussed, for just one example. And "sounding like the Queen" isn't "ectually" the same as Received Pronunciation.
U.S. people will similarly point out that it is far from the case that everyone speaks General American.
Leicester, as you say, has the “Lestah” pronunciation.
Peterborough has the ubiquitous glottal stop (sorry, Pe’erborough has the ubiqui’ous glo’al stop).
Rutland has neither.
It’s 20 miles from Leicester to Rutland and another 20 from Rutland to Peterborough. When I lived there I could often pinpoint a Rutland accent to within a group of villages, though I don’t think I could do so today.
Also I really dislike British exaggerated r sounds added to eg pass staff mask so they become parse starf marsk. And also American A in pasta or Mario (more ree oh) or words like mango becoming almost mongo.
Speaking is weird. We need an English academy that officially standardises (or is that with a z? Zed or zee? ) all this and fixes the silly spelling while they're at it.
My experience as an American is that most Americans pronounce these with ‘ah’ sounds, not with the American A sound. Someone using the American A for those words would come across as very…regional, it would really stick out. Well, to me anyway.
You do hear [mæɹioʊ] in northeastern American dialects. I think it's also more common in older speakers.
Also took me a long while to realise “Wall-E” is a pun in American English.
I know more than one ex-Brit who had the unpleasant experience of shouting “does anyone have a rubber? I need a rubber really bad! Can anyone give me a rubber please?”
In middle school.
Also for those mentioning words that are lewd or harmless depending on which side of the ocean you're at, those are nothing compared to Portuguese in Brazil/Portugal.
I love switching to heavy dialect for a second just to annoy Canadians
It isn't.
It obeys the McNaughton rule: would you do it (say it) in front of a policeman (your mother).
It's used for humour, by a small minority. It's used to offend routinely. It's not normal to ask for things by saying "oi, cunt.. pass me the salt"
If you want an american version of this, propose people start casting the same meme with the N* word. I think you'll find this falls flat.
And he's bored of being sent to the headmasters office so he uses it less in class now. And because he wants to keep that job at Maccas and buy a jetski he doesn't use it at work...
Source: English spouse and Australian best friend
Difference indicates departing from something. It's "different from".
Oh well, I guess they'll just have to continue being obviously wrong...
https://separatedbyacommonlanguage.blogspot.com/
https://notoneoffbritishisms.com/
https://bookshop.org/books/the-prodigal-tongue-the-love-hate-relationship-between-american-and-british-english/9780143131106This is really something else.
Update: I have been flipping back and forth between article and comments, and just discovered this is mentioned:
""" So you hear the two different ts in “water” again, but more prominently you hear the British use “ooo” where the Americans use a sound that’s closer to an “aaa”. W/ooo/ter. W/aaa/ter. This one is also quite easy to learn because it’s a general thing. Somewhat more difficult is the next one. Again pay attention to the vowels. """
I think it's a slight mistake to describe this one as a "British" general pronunciation. While there are things we'd all pronounce similarly the "a" in "altered" and "water" would be pronounced "aw" in Scotland and Northern Ireland and possibly some of England.
I never noticed the thing about “T”s being pronounced differently but I suppose that makes a lot of sense
British: Pars the pahs-ta
American: Pahs the pars-ta
Australian: Pahs the pahs-ta
South African: Pars the pars-ta
As an American, I’m confused about who pronounces pasta that way. I don’t think that fits General American.
Also anywhere above the trap/bath split in the UK is going to give a different result.
In Subway I often have trouble asking for tomato on my sandwich. "Tomatoes please. Tomatoes. TOMATOES. The round red things? Thank you."
One of the best (funny) characterization of the British (not only the accent) remains the by now almost forgotten (and obviously largely outdated) "How to be an alien" by George Mikes (1946).
> The easiest way to give the impression of having a good accent or no foreign accent at all is to hold an unlit pipe in your mouth, to mutter between your teeth and finish all your sentences with the question: 'isn't it?' People will not understand much, but they are accustomed to that and they will get a most excellent impression.