American and British English

American and British English vary significantly. However there are two main reasons for having no precise estimates to show the quantity of differences. Firstly it  has become obvious during recent decades that they  have had a great impact on each other, particularly American on British. US films and television have impacted on British vocabulary and as a result British people, particularly teenagers, have begun to use some words from American vocabulary.However British films and various TV programmes are enough in the USA, for UK vocabulary not to be disregarded. Studies of both countries’ local dialects have shown that there are many lexical differentiations. Not all of these forms are involved in general dictionaries as having a wide use. Nevertheless they do possess a vital role in the local areas. Taking into consideration local festivals, abbreviations, institutional differences, everyday slang and etc., regional differences seem to be considerably large. What is the difference of being American and being English? American identity is more connected with home origins. When two Americans meet abroad, they will likely put the stress on their home states or colleges, while the same can’t be said about two Britons. The main difference between American and British English is the spelling. For instance BrE-re, AmE-er (centre/ center), BrE-our, AmE-or (colour /color) and BrE- ogue, AmE-og (catalogue/ catalog). There is a list of many words, which differ by their spelling(e.g. aeroplane- BrE, airplane- AmE), of course many words are common in both areas, such as aesthetics, chili, grey, jail and so on.

Lexical differences of two regions are classified into three distinctions: a stock of words which we can see only in AmE, some words are used only in BrE and some words are known worldwide as a  part of Standard English (WSE). It is also essential to know that some words are used in both countries , but can be met more frequently in one of them. For instance flat and apartement are common in both, but the first one is often used in BrE and the latter in AmE. So there is a list of vocabulary revealing  that there are many words in BrE and AmE that are not the same. For instance the American will use candy instead of sweets(BrE). There is a huge amount of such words. The video intoduced below, which is a dialogue provides such word examples and it is an aid for understandig differences between British and American English.

                            

                            

What concerns to their grammatical differences, they aren’t so frequent between educated BrE and AmE. These distinctions mainly occur in morphology and syntax (e.g. irregular verbs) and few deviations in syntactic constructions. AmE prefers have to have got. AmE gives preference to collective nouns in the singular (the government is), while BrE also permits plural(the government are) and so on.