American English in relation to British English

When studying both British English and American English, it is clear that they actually vary little in their essential features, with only a few occasional and noticeable differences. However, dialects within both types of this English have created great variations in the spoken forms, reflecting long histories of dialect development in isolated populations. Whilst mass media, printing and technology has created standardised forms of each; Received Pronunciation within England which is traditionally regarded as ‘BBC English’ or ‘the Queen’s English’, along with an unofficial standard for Spoken American English typically heard from network newscasters.
The divergence between American English and British English was once described as ‘two countries divided by a common language’ and one particular contribution towards formalizing these differences came when Noah Webster wrote the first American dictionary. One main difference between the two is evident with collective nouns. In BrE, collective nouns can take either singular or plural verb forms, whilst in AmE they are almost all singular in construction. BrE: The Clash are a well-known band, AmE: The Clash is a well-known band, and this difference occurs for all nouns of multitude.

In addition to this, Americans also use the present perfect tense less than speakers of British English; BrE: I’ve already eaten, AmE: I already ate. This minor grammatical difference is not alone and spelling too has different rules for each. For instance, some words that end in ‘-tre’ in British English end in ‘-ter’ in American English such as theatre/theater and centre/center. This is similar to words that end in ‘-our’ in British English which end in ‘-or’ in American. Along with the fact that there are a lot of different words being used for each-

British American
Autumn Fall
Boot Trunk
Chemist’s Drug Store

Prepositions also vary between British English and American English, in the US the word through can mean ‘up to and including’ such as ‘Monday through Friday’ whilst in the UK it is stated ‘Monday to Friday’. Many other prepositions like this are also different between the two demonstrating the different usage of them between the two countries.

It is evident that there are many different variations between British English and American English and it is not surprising due to the separation of the two countries. One main cause of this is due to pronunciation differences. The general idea is that regional and national pride and changing ideas about what sounded like ‘proper’ speech, to some degree, played a role in changing the British sounding speech in both England and America as those with higher status’s and better jobs attempted to formalise their speech. Furthermore, both countries each have an extensive range of dialects within their own countries, and the geographical separation of the countries themselves has led to diverse dialects and therefore, a difference between the two.