Main Comparative Peculiarities of American and British English Standards

 

 

 

 

MINISTRY OF EDUCATION AND SCIENCE, YOUTH AND SPORTS                   OF UKRAINE

 

ENGLISH PHILOLOGY DEPARTMENT

 

 

Main Comparative Peculiarities of American and British  English Standards

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Kyiv – 2013

Content

Introduction………………………………………………………………………4

Chapter І Main features of British English……………………………………..8                                                                                                       1. 1The history of British English…………………………………………….…....8

1.2. Differences in British dialects………………………………………………..13

1.2.1 Regional differences………………………………………………....14

1.2.2 Standardization…………………………………………………..….18

1.3. Accents in British English……………………………………………………19

Conclusion to Chapter I…………………………………………………………26

Chapter ІІ Main features of American English……………………………….28

2.1. The history of American English…………………………………………….28

2.2. Regional variations of American English Language………………………...30

2.3. Social variations of American English……………………………………….32

         2.3.1 Influences: British and American…………………………………….41

         2.3.2 An Indian English Grammar………………………………………….43

 Conclusion to Chapter II……………………………………………………….47

Chapter ІІІ Main Comparative Peculiarities of American and  British  English Standards…………………………………………………………………………...49

3.1. Comparative peculiarities of British English and American  English ……….49                                                                                                                3.2. Sound system ………….……………………………………………………..52                                                                                                                          3.3. Pronunciation symbols …………………………………….………..……….64                           3.4 Pronunciation challenges. ……………………………………………………66                                                                                                                  Conclusion to Chapter III……………………………….………………………70                                                                                                                   General Conclusions………………………………………………………..…....73                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                  List of References………………………………………………………………..85

 

 

 

Introduction

British English (BrE) is the form of English used in the United Kingdom. It includes all English dialects used within the United Kingdom.

American English (AmE) is the form of English used in the United States. It includes all English dialects used within the United States.

           Written forms of British and American English as found in newspapers and textbooks very little in their essential features, with only occasional noticeable differences in comparable media [46] (comparing American newspapers with British newspapers, for example). This kind of formal English, particularly written English, is often called "standard English". [78], [37]

           The spoken forms of British English vary considerably, reflecting a long history of dialect development amid isolated populations. Dialects, word use and accents vary not only among the countries of the United Kingdom, England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales, but also within these individual countries. Received Pronunciation (RP) refers to a way of pronouncing Standard English that is actually used by about two percent of the UK population. It remains the accent upon which dictionary pronunciation guides are based, and for teaching English as a foreign language. It is referred to colloquially as "BBC English", "Oxford English" and "the Queen's English", although none of these actually use or require it exclusively. [55]

            An unofficial standard for spoken 9American English has also developed, as a result of mass media and geographic and social mobility, and broadly describes the English typically heard from network newscasters, commonly referred to as non-regional diction, although local newscasters tend toward more parochial forms of speech. Despite this unofficial standard, regional variations of American English have not only persisted but have actually intensified, according to linguist William Labov.

 

Regional dialects in the United States typically reflect the elements of the language of the main immigrant groups in any particular region of the country, especially in terms of pronunciation and vernacular vocabulary. Scholars have mapped at least four major regional variations of spoken American English: Northern, Southern, Midland, and Western. After the American Civil War, the settlement of the western territories by migrants from the east led to dialect mixing and leveling, so that regional dialects are most strongly differentiated in the eastern parts of the country that were settled earlier. Localized dialects also exist with quite distinct variations, such as in Southern Appalachia and New York.

          British and American English are the reference norms for English as spoken, written, and taught in the rest of the world. For instance the English-speaking members of the Commonwealth often closely follow British English forms while many new American English forms quickly become familiar outside of the United States. Although most dialects of English used in the former British Empire outside of North America are, to various extents, based on British English, most of the countries concerned have developed their own unique dialects, particularly with respect to pronunciation, idioms and vocabulary. Chief among other English dialects are Canadian English, based on the English of United Empire Loyalists who left the 13 Colonies, [55; 422] and Australian English, which rank third and fourth in number of native speakers.

The English language was first introduced to the Americas by British colonization, beginning in 1607 in Jamestown, Virginia. Similarly, the language spread to numerous other parts of the world as a result of British trade and colonization elsewhere and the spread of the former British Empire, which, by 1921, held sway over a population of 470–570 million people, approximately a quarter of the world's population at that time.

          Over the past 400 years the form of the language used in the Americas—especially in the United States—and that used in the United Kingdom have diverged in a few minor ways, leading to the dialects now occasionally referred to as American English and British English. Differences between the two include pronunciation, grammar, vocabulary (lexis), spelling, punctuation, idioms, formatting of dates and numbers, although the differences in written and most spoken grammar structure tend to be much less than those of other aspects of the language in terms of mutual intelligibility. A small number of words have completely different meanings in the two dialects or are even unknown or not used in one of the dialects. One particular contribution towards formalizing these differences came from Noah Webster, who wrote the first American dictionary (published 1828) with the intention of showing that people in the United States spoke a different dialect from Britain, much like a regional accent.

           This divergence between American English and British English once caused George Bernard Shaw to say that the United States and United Kingdom are "two countries divided by a common language"; [56] a similar comment is ascribed to Winston Churchill. Likewise, Oscar Wilde wrote, "We have really everything in common with America nowadays, except, of course, the language" (The Canterville Ghost, 1888). Henry Sweet incorrectly predicted in 1877 that within a century American English, Australian English and British English would be mutually unintelligible. It may be the case that increased worldwide communication through radio, television, the Internet and globalization has reduced the tendency to regional variation. This can result either in some variations becoming extinct (for instance, the wireless, superseded by the radio) or in the acceptance of wide variations as "perfectly good English" everywhere. Often at the core of the dialect though, the idiosyncrasies remain.

            Nevertheless it remains the case that, although spoken American and British English are generally mutually intelligible, there are enough differences to cause occasional misunderstandings or at times embarrassment—for example some words that are quite innocent in one dialect may be considered vulgar in the other.

So, the topicality of the master’s paper is a lumber (approximately junk) and corn of British and American English Language.

The object of research is American and British English discourse

The subject of research is differences between American and British English languages

The aim of the theme is to study deeply the differences of American and British English. There are thousands of differences in detail between British and American English, and occasionally they crowd together enough to make some difficulty. If you read that a man, having trouble with his lorry, got out his spanner and lifted the bonnet to see what was the matter, you might not realize that the driver of the truck had taken out his wrench and lifted the hood. It is amusing to play with such differences, but the theory that the American language is now essentially different from English does not hold up. It is often very difficult to decide whether a book was written by an American or an English man. Even in speech it would be hard to prove that national differences are greater than some local differences in either country. On the whole, it now seems probable that the language habits of the two countries will grow more, rather than less, alike, although some differences will undoubtedly remain and others may develop.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter I

Main features of British English

1.1 The history of British English

               English is a West Germanic language that originated from the Anglo-Frisian dialects brought to Britain by Germanic invaders from various parts of what is now northwest Germany and the Netherlands. Initially, Old English was a diverse group of dialects, reflecting the varied origins of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England. One of these dialects, Late West Saxon, eventually came to dominate.

               English changed enormously in the Middle Ages. Written Old English of AD 100 is similar in vocabulary and grammar to other old Germanic languages such as Old High German and Old Norse, and completely unintelligible to modern speakers, while the modern language is already largely recognizable in written Middle English of AD 1400. This was caused by two further waves of invasion: the first by speakers of the Scandinavian branch of the Germanic language family, who conquered and colonized parts of Britain in the 8th and 9th centuries; the second by the Normans in the 11th century, who spoke Old Norman and ultimately developed an English variety of this called Anglo-Norman. A large proportion of the modern English vocabulary comes directly from Anglo-Norman.

              Cohabitation with the Scandinavians resulted in a significant grammatical simplification and lexical enrichment of the Anglo-Frisian core of English. However, this had not reached South West England by the 9th century AD, where Old English was developed into a full-fledged literary language. This was completely disrupted by the Norman invasion in 1066, and when literary English rose anew in the 13th century, it was based on the speech of London, much closer to the centre of Scandinavian settlement. Technical and cultural vocabulary was largely derived from Old Norman, with particularly heavy influence in the courts and government. With the coming of the Renaissance, as with most other developing European languages such as German and Dutch, Latin and Ancient Greek supplanted Norman and French as the main source of new words. Thus, English developed into very much a "borrowing" language with an enormously disparate vocabulary.

              The languages of Germanic peoples gave rise to the English language (the Angles, Saxons, Frisii, Jutes and possibly the Franks, who traded and fought with the Latin-speaking Roman Empire in the centuries-long process of the Germanic peoples' expansion into Western Europe during the Migration Period). Some Latin words for common objects entered the vocabulary of these Germanic peoples before their arrival in Britain and their subsequent formation of England.

             The main source of information for the culture of the Germanic peoples (the ancestors of the English) in ancient times is Tacitus' Germania, written around 100 AD. While remaining conversant with Roman civilization and its economy, including serving in the Roman military, they retained political independence. Some Germanic troops served in Britannia under the Romans. It is unlikely that Germanic settlement in Britain was intensified (except for Frisians) until the arrival of mercenaries in the 5th century as described by Gildas. As it was, the Angles, Saxons and Jutes arrived as Germanic pagans, independent of Roman control.

             According to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, around the year 449, Vortigern, King of the Britons, invited the "Angle kin" (Angles allegedly led by the Germanic brothers Hengist and Horsa) to help him in conflicts with the Picts. In return, the Angles were granted lands in the southeast of Britain. Further aid was sought, and in response "came men of Ald Seaxum of Anglum of Iotum" (Saxons, Angles and Jutes). The Chronicle talks of a subsequent influx of settlers who eventually established seven kingdoms, known as the heptarchy. However, modern scholars view the figures of Hengist and Horsa as Euhemerised deities from Anglo-Saxon paganism, who ultimately stem from the religion of the Proto-Indo-Europeans.

 

Old English. The invaders' Germanic language displaced the indigenous Brythonic languages and Latin in most of the areas of Great Britain that were later to become England. The original Celtic languages remained in parts of Scotland, Wales and Cornwall (where Cornish was spoken into the 19th century). Latin also remained in these areas as the language of the Celtic Church and of higher education for the nobility. Latin was later to be reintroduced to England by missionaries from both the Celtic and Roman churches, and it would, in time, exert an enormous influence over English. What is now called Old English emerged over time out of the many dialects and languages of the colonizing tribes. [66] Even then, it continued to exhibit local language variation, the remnants of which continue to be found in dialects of Modern English.[49] The most famous surviving work from the Old English period is the epic poem Beowulf composed by an unknown poet.

         Old English did not sound or look like the Standard English of today. Any native English speaker of today would find Old English unintelligible without studying it as a separate language. Nevertheless, about half of the most commonly used words in Modern English have Old English roots. The words be, strong and water, for example, derive from Old English; and many non-standard dialects such as Scots and Northumbrian English have retained many features of Old English in vocabulary and pronunciation. [76] Old English was spoken until sometime in the 12th or 13th century.

            Later, English was strongly influenced by the North Germanic language Old Norse, spoken by the Norsemen who invaded and settled mainly in the North East of England (see Jórvík and Danelaw). The new and the earlier settlers spoke languages from different branches of the Germanic family; many of their lexical roots were the same or similar, although their grammars were more distinct.

           The Germanic language of these Old English-speaking inhabitants was influenced by contact with Norse invaders, which might have been responsible for some of the morphological simplification of Old English, including the loss of grammatical gender and explicitly marked case (with the notable exception of the pronouns). English words of Old Norse origin include anger, bag, both, hit, law, leg, same, skill, sky, take, and many others, possibly even including the pronoun they.

            The introduction of Christianity added another wave of Latin and some Greek words. The Old English period formally ended some time after the Norman conquest (starting in 1066 AD), when the language was influenced to an even greater extent by the Normans, who spoke a French dialect called Old Norman. The use of Anglo-Saxon to describe a merging of Anglian and Saxon languages and cultures is a relatively modern development.

Middle English.  For about 300 years following the Norman Conquest in 1066, the Norman kings and their high nobility spoke only one of the French langues d'oïl, that we call Anglo-Norman, which was a variety of Old Norman used in England and to some extent elsewhere in the British Isles during the Anglo-Norman period and originating from a northern dialect of Old French, whilst English continued to be the language of the common people. Middle English was influenced by both Anglo-Norman and, later, Anglo-French (see characteristics of the Anglo-Norman language).

              Even after the decline of Norman-French, standard French retained the status of a formal or prestige language—as with most of Europe during the period—and had a significant influence on the language, which is visible in Modern English today (see English language word origins and List of English words of French origin). A tendency for French-derived words to have more formal connotations has continued to the present day; most modern English speakers would consider a "cordial reception" (from French) to be more formal than a "hearty welcome" (Germanic). Another example is the very unusual construction of the words for animals being separate from the words for their meat, e.g., beef and pork (from the French bœuf and porc) being the products of "cows" and "pigs"—animals with Germanic names.

 

English was also influenced by the Celtic languages it was displacing, especially the Brittonic substrate, most notably with the introduction of the continuous aspect—a feature found in many modern languages but developed earlier and more thoroughly in English.

           While the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle continued until 1154, most other literature from this period was in Old Norman or Latin. A large number of Norman words were taken into Old English, with many doubling for Old English words. The Norman influence is the hallmark of the linguistic shifts in English over the period of time following the invasion, producing what is now referred to as Middle English.

           The most famous writer from the Middle English period was Geoffrey Chaucer, and The Canterbury Tales is his best-known work. English literature started to reappear around 1200, when a changing political climate and the decline in Anglo-Norman made it more respectable. The Provisions of Oxford, released in 1258, was the first English government document to be published in the English language since the Conquest. In 1362, Edward III became the first king to address Parliament in English. By the end of that century, even the royal court had switched to English. Anglo-Norman remained in use in limited circles somewhat longer, but it had ceased to be a living language.

           English spelling was also influenced by Norman in this period, with the /θ/ and /ð/ sounds being spelled th rather than with the Old English letters þ (thorn) and ð (eth), which did not exist in Norman. These letters remain in the modern Icelandic alphabet, which is descended from the alphabet of Old Norse.

Early Modern English. Modern English is often dated from the Great Vowel Shift, which took place mainly during the 15th century. English was further transformed by the spread of a standardized London-based dialect in government and administration and by the standardising effect of printing. By the time of William Shakespeare (mid 16th - early 17th century),[8] the language had become clearly recognizable as Modern English. In 1604, the first English dictionary was published, the Table Alphabetical. English has continuously adopted foreign words, especially from Latin and Greek, since the Renaissance. (In the 17th century, Latin words were often used with the original inflections, but these eventually disappeared). As there are many words from different languages and English spelling is variable, the risk of mispronunciation is high, but remnants of the older forms remain in a few regional dialects, most notably in the West Country.

Modern English. In 1755, Samuel Johnson published the first significant English dictionary, his Dictionary of the English Language. The main difference between Early Modern English and Late Modern English is vocabulary. Late Modern English has many more words, arising from two principal factors: firstly, the Industrial Revolution and technology created a need for new words; secondly, the British Empire at its height covered one quarter of the Earth's surface, and the English language adopted foreign words from many countries.

 

1.2 Differences in British dialects