Teacher Discussion Forums

Hey everyone. I need a list of comparisons between British and American English. i.e. lift / elevator, gasoline / petrol, etc. etc. Anyone offer me some help here? Thank you.

I was trying to find a vaguely-remembered site, but came up with the following instead:
http://www3.telus.net/linguisticsissues ... vocab.html

There are doubtless quite a few more you can unearth with a bit of creative Googling.
http://www.google.co.jp/search?as_q=dif ... as_rights=

The Hamster is right, there's not much that you can get from us to do with simple differences that you couldn't get from a search engine. You'll find tables and tables of them.

What I'd be more interested in is what words are being borrowed by the respective languages from each other.

Wikipedia says this on general trends:

While the use of American expressions in British English is often noted in the UK, movement in the opposite direction is less common. But recent examples exist, including the idiom "to go missing," which had been a distinctively British expression but is used increasingly in American English, at least in journalism. The noun "queue" also seems to be making inroads in the U.S. as well. (The usual American equivalents of "to go missing" and "queue" are "to disappear" and "line", respectively.) Also, the spelling of 'travelling' and 'traveller' and 'judgement' through observations appear to be creeping into American English.

Americans would be more qualified to talk about American borrowings than me (I'm British), but I've also heard that the word "trousers" is also begining to be used for the outer garment when referring to particularly good quality apparel.

I expect that "drop in the ocean" will also make it since it's a more extreme metaphore than the more usual "drop in the bucket".

Interesting stuff, Andy. It's nice to know that there's some linguistic traffic in a westerly direction too across the Atlantic!

You know a bit about corpora; could you see what's hapening using corpora?

fluffyhamster wrote:It's nice to know that there's some linguistic traffic in a westerly direction too across the Atlantic!

Well, you'll be happy to hear that my American/Mexican kids say (or said) things like "Easy peasy Japanesy, don't forget the lemon squeezy" and "He's a real slow-coach." My younger son is QUITE fond of say that or that is "QUITE ____" proper Etonian intonation. But then they all attended British expat schools in Oman and Dad's been visiting York a couple times a year for the past 5 years -- still can't understand the lads in the Chips shop though!

Thank you all very much. I know I dont post here much, but you have all proven a very valuable resource whenever I have needed help. Thank you.

Hmm, I'm always suspicious about these kinds of generalisations as they are usually limited to a teachers own limited knowledge and experience of language variation.

How about comparing American and American dialects first! There's enough variation there to keep everyone busy for a lifetime.

Same goes for the thousands of British varieties. I could say to a class,"In the UK we call 'sneakers', 'pumps'." But that would mean nothing to three quarters of the British population.

Indeed, "pumps" is now I think a bit old fashioned. (Can anyone confirm this?, "Plimsoles" was another South East England word for the same shoe and is I think also old-fashioned. Again, can anyone confirm this?) These words were confined to South East England in my youth at least. The Welsh English word was always "daps", and is likewise now rarely heard.

The current universal British English word for these shoes is "trainers".

Interesting. In American, pumps are ladies' dress shoes with a closed toe and a bit of a heel. Fifty years or so ago, pumps were ballroom dancing shoes for either sex.

Concur with AP; the last time I heard anyone say "pumps" to refer to trainers was in the famous (in the UK at least) Two Ronnies "Four Candles" sketch in the 1970s.

My advice for you is to get a dictionary, maybe Lonmand Dictionary, which will give you a list of word of difference.
Maybe your topic is too large, I'ma fraid. British and American English are different in grammar, vocabulary, pronunciation, intonation,spelling,etc. If I were you, I'll narrow down my topic.

t.d. wrote:Hey everyone. I need a list of comparisons between British and American English. i.e. lift / elevator, gasoline / petrol, etc. etc. Anyone offer me some help here? Thank you.

Also try the Business English Forim on this sight.
Check out any post started by 'Isatan', he start many threads on BrE vs AmE

are you just looking for the lexical differences? BEcause there are also pronunciation differences (i.e. glottal stops being used more frequently, and the aspiration of consonants dependading on vowels etc)?

This book is interesting to dip into:
British or American English?: A Handbook of Word and Grammar Patterns (Studies in English Language) by John Algeo (CUP)

Some caution is required, though, because the majority of the examples that provide the springboards for any comparisions with AmE seem to be drawn from Algeo's custom-built corpus of British crime fiction (i.e. cannot be said to be truly representative of spontaneous speech, or writing in general). But it provides a good place to start, to be sure.