(00:00): Hello and welcome to the Merlin English Afterthought. Throughout this series, we'll be looking back at previous audio blogs and discussing them in a bit more detail.

(00:10): Today, we'll be looking at episode number five, the advanced audio blog titled American versus British English, a comprehensive guide. As usual, then I'm here at

(00:20): www.melinenglish.co.uk/members where we have this episode's full webpage along with the transcription and additional resources. So I'm going to begin then by looking at the introduction and particularly this line here.

(00:36): Today, two major variants of English are used - American English (AmE) and British English (BrE). So, for some they might have heard of the term an accent, maybe you've even heard of a dialect. Here we use a variant.

(00:53): So I'm going to quickly just touch on the differences between these three areas of language. So an accent, an accent is all to do with how we pronounce words.

(01:04): So, for example, if you're from the south of England, your accent might cause you to pronounce your T's more in certain words.

(01:12): They might say better, city, water. By comparison, somebody in the US might be more likely to round that T sound, so it almost sounds like a D, so they might say.

(01:25): better, water, city. So if we compare two sentences, I visited the city, I visited the city. That change there in language would be a change in accent, the way we're pronouncing things changes

(01:44): If we compare that to a dialect, a dialect has more to do with the actual structure and the grammar of our sentences.

(01:52): So in standard English, we only have one pronoun for the second person and that would be you. So it doesn't matter if I'm talking to one person or a group of people, I will always address them as you.

(02:05): However, if we travel to, say, the north of England, a place like Newcastle, they might speak with a Geordie dialect.

(02:12): And in the Geordie dialect it would be perfectly acceptable and people would understand if you pluralised that and said youse, youse. So they might say, where have youse been?

(02:26): Or where are youse going? And this would be perfectly okay. Everybody would be able to understand that. And that would be an example of a dialect.

(02:34): The way we are forming our sentences, change. Now a language variant is almost like a subcategory of English. So a language variant is a deviation from standard English.

(02:49): And variants typically are associated with certain geographical locations and normally countries. So we have a map here of some different English speaking countries across the world and as you can imagine somebody in Bangladesh is going to use a different type of English to somebody in Jamaica.

(03:10): Now there might be a few different reasons for this, perhaps there are some historical factors, geographical factors, the influence of other languages around that certain place is also going to have an influence.

(03:24): So for us to just categorise all of these as just English is a little bit difficult at this point because English is so widespread and differs so much from place to place.

(03:36): So the way people would think of it is we would have English as the overarching language and then underneath English you would have very different variants of English and within those variants you can have different accents and different dialects which would perhaps be more regional.

(03:53): As we mentioned today though, we will just be looking at the variants of American and British English. So let's go down to talk about some of the history here. So, of course, the first English people travelled to America at the end of the 16th century.

(04:11): So the end of the 1500s, obviously by 1607, Jamestown, the first English settlement was founded and then really the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries were a very interesting time for the English language.

(04:28): So we had things such as the great vowel shift occurring, we had the transition from early modern English into modern English and we also had this mass migration.

(04:39): So we saw English spreading around the world and being used in countries where it had simply, never been before. Now this led to quite interesting developments and a quite interesting diversification of the language.

(04:53): Now if we think about those early settlers who left England to travel to America, those early travellers would have spoke with, what we'd call, rhotic speech.

(05:03): Or their speech would have had rhoticity. Now rhoticity is all to do with how we are pronouncing the r sound in our words.

(05:11): So for me I'm from England and England is typically seen as a non-rhotic speaking country. By comparison America would be seen in general as a rhotic speaking country and this is why we have differences in pronunciations of certain words.

(05:28): For example we say car in England. So you'll notice that when we say that in a non-rotic way that we keep our mouth quite open.

(05:38): If we compare that to somebody speaking with rhoticity they're gonna be more likely to pronounce that r sound much more prominently so they would say car, car, okay so we'd have park, non-rhotic, park, rhotic, hard

(05:56): Non-rhotic, hard, rhotic. Now the shift of people from England moving away from rhoticity is down to a multitude of factors one of them being that at the time you know, high society, people of power and influence started to move away from that and speak less, speak with less rhoticity in their everyday language.

(06:22): Of course as the years went on this influenced the wider population and was something that was developed over time.

(06:31): Whereas in America and other countries they didn't have that influence of the higher class or high society changing their language.

(06:38): So that's why we see in England people generally are non-rhotic speakers, some exceptions such as the west country of England which would be in the southwestern area.

(06:53): Again we have a map here to show and we can just see just how much rhoticity has been lost in just the 65 years.

(07:01): from the 1950s till 2016. So if you imagine this was back in, you know, the 1600s, rhoticity was much more widespread.

(07:11): Much, much more of the population spoke with rhoticity. However nowadays this is really limited to that Southwestern area and you can also find rhoticity in a lot of Scottish areas.

(07:24): People with Scottish accents tend to speak with rhoticity as well. Likewise in America, generally speaking Americans speak with a rhotic accent.

(07:34): But there are some areas saying the North West, North East of the, the United States which would speak with a non-rhotic accent.

(07:42): For example, a place like Boston, it would say car, park. And that of course would be a non-rhotic accent.

(07:50): So pronunciation was not the only difference between American and British English, we also have differences in spelling and vocabulary, and if we start by looking at the differences in spelling.

(08:01): This can really be attributed to one man and one man alone and that would be Mr. Noah Webster. So Noah Webster was a linguist from the 1700s and in 1828 he published the first American dictionary and this was called an American dictionary of the English language and this was the first time we saw a

(08:24): standardised version of American English and these this standardised version had standardised pronunciation standardised spelling and meaning and really no Webster did this as a way to of course standardise American English as its own legitimate variant of language as well as creating a sense of

(08:48): national pride and unity around a common language. So a lot of these spelling differences that we see today between British and American English rarely come from one man and that was Noah Webster.

(09:03): Vocabulary differences as we mentioned vocabulary differences occur for many reasons. If we think about England and the history of outside influence, of course we had the Norman Conquest in 1066 where the French invaded and ruled England for a long time and there we saw the integration of a lot of French

(09:28): words into the English language. So before the French invasion English only had one word for say cows so whether you were talking about the animal cow meat which we would now call beef we didn't have this before and it was only when the French invaded and ruled England that we saw these differences

(09:51): of things like beef and pork and that's an example of how new words can be introduced into a language. Of course for America and American English this was a place where we saw huge huge huge immigration from all over Europe and all over the world and the mixing and combining of all these different languages

(10:13): and cultures really created and increased the lexicon of the English language. This can also link into the differences between grammar and while some slight differences occur between American English and British English.

(10:31): And although there are some differences here between these two variants of language, for the most part they are completely understood.

(10:38): We can easily as an English person speak to an American and understand almost everything which they are saying. The differences and nuances are very minor and not so significant.

(10:53): So when we're talking about accents, different dialects and different variants, it's very important for us to approach this with an open mind and an open heart.

(11:04): Unfortunately for many people, many people are judged on the way that they speak. We might assume that somebody is of a certain socio-economic background.

(11:14): We might judge somebody as being from a certain level of education, just by the way that they speak. So, with language, when we're interacting with people from anywhere in the world, it's important that we try and keep an open mind and a judgment-free attitude towards them.

(11:31): No one variant or no one accent or dialect is better than the other. And the way somebody speak definitely does not define their moral judgment or them as a character.

(11:42): So, try and keep an open mind, try and approach language in a very liberal way and yeah, great. That's all we've got time for today.

(11:51): Thank you very much for watching until the end and I will hopefully see you in the next one.