AMERICAN AND BRITISH ENGLISH

As we move away from the formal written English of the press in the direction of the informal spoken language, the differences between regional varieties dramatically increase. In the case of American and British English, the variation is considerable, but there are no accurate estimates for the number of points of contrast, for two chief reasons.

Recent decades have seen a major increase in the amount of influence the two models have had on each other, especially American on British. The influence of US films and television has led to a considerable pas?sive understanding of much American the English vocabulary in Britain, and some of this has turned into active use (as in the case of mail), especially among younger people. The reverse pattern is less obvious, but British films and TV programmes are seen suffi?ciently often in the USA to mean that a growth in awareness of UK vocabulary should not be dis?counted. What were originally fairly clear patterns of lexical differentiation have been obscured by borrow?ing on a world-wide scale.

The regional dialect surveys of both countries, sev?eral of which have only recently begun to publish their findings, are bringing to light huge amounts of lexical distinctiveness. Few of these forms have any literary background or enough breadth of use to war?rant their inclusion in general dictionaries, but they do form an important part of the regional pattern, and several of them are retained in educated usage at local level as markers of group identity.

Nonetheless, when we take into account local festivals and folklore, abbreviations, localities, institutional differences (e.g. politics, banking, legal systems, armed forces, sports, honours), local fauna and flora, and everyday slang, the stock of regional differences is likely to be extremely large. In a casual collection made by the author in the 1970s, based solely on available dictionaries and literary works, 5,000 differences were found very easily, and it became apparent that the pro?ject was too large for such an informal treatment. A recently published dictionary by David Grote has some 6,500 entries, and deals only with British English for American readers. These totals, it must be appreci?ated, arise because we are dealing not only with differ?ent words (lexemes), but also different senses of words. UK chips (= US (French) fries) is not the same as US chips (= UK crisps) ? though American influence has brought both (French) fries and (potato) chips to Britain.

(From: D.Crystal. The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language. 1995. ?. 306.)

2. Give the American spelling of the following words and describe the main patterns of spelling differences between the two variants (use dictionaries):

3. Find words in British and American English with partially different semantic structures (e.g.:administration, bill).

4. Find words common to both British and American English in which the meaning of American English is entirely different from that in British English (e.g.:pants, public school, vest).

5. Match the words with the same denotational meaning. State which of the words and word-combinations given below are used in British English /American English:

Date: 2016-06-12; view: 101