British English

British English or English in the United Kingdom (In English: British English, UK English, BrE, BE, en-GB) is the broad term used to distinguish forms of the English language used in the United Kingdom from those elsewhere, as North America. The Oxford English Dictionary applies the term to British English (British English) "as spoken or written in the British Isles; especially the forms of English used in Great Britain...", reserving, for example, Hiberno-English for "The English language as spoken and written in Ireland".

There are regional variations in formal English written in the UK; for example, although the words wee and little are interchangeable in some contexts, it is more likely to find wee written by someone from the north of Great Britain (and especially Scotland) or from Ireland and occasionally Yorkshire than by someone from the South of England or Wales. Even so, there is a significant degree of uniformity in written English within the UK, and this can best be described as 'British English'. The forms of spoken English, however, vary considerably more than in most areas of the world where it is spoken, and a uniform concept of "British English" it is therefore more difficult to apply to the spoken language. According to Tom McArthur in the Oxford Guide to World English (p. 45), "for many people, especially in England, the phrase British English is a tautology", and shares "all the ambiguities and stresses in the word British, and as a result can be interpreted in two ways, more broadly or narrowly, within a range of confusion and ambiguity".

History

English is a West Germanic language that originated from Anglo-Frisian dialects brought to England by Germanic settlers from various parts of what is now northwestern Germany and the northern Netherlands. Initially, the Anglo-Saxon language was a diverse group of dialects, reflecting the varied origins of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England. One such dialect, the West Saxon dialect, came to dominate. The Anglo-Saxon language was influenced by two waves of invasion; the first by the speakers of the Scandinavian branch of the Germanic family; they conquered and colonized parts of Britain in the vii and nixth centuries centuries. The second was from the Normans in the xi century, who spoke Old Norman and developed a variety of English called Anglo-Norman. These two invasions caused English to become "mixed" to a certain degree (although it was never a mixed language in the strict sense of the word; mixed languages arise from the cohabitation of speakers of different languages, who develop a hybrid language by basic communication).

Cohabitation with Scandinavians resulted in significant grammar simplification and lexical enrichment of the Anglo-Frisian core of English; the subsequent Norman occupation led to the insertion into that Germanic core of a more elaborate layer of words from the Romance branch of the Indo-European languages. This Norman influence entered English largely through the courts and the government.

Standardization

Like English around the world, the language spoken in the UK and Ireland is governed by convention rather than formal code: there is no body equivalent to the Académie française or the Royal Spanish Academy, and authoritative dictionaries (for example, Oxford English Dictionary, Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English, Chambers Dictionary, Collins Dictionary) record usage but they do not prescribe it. Furthermore, vocabulary and its usage change over time; words are easily borrowed from other languages ("loan words") and other varieties of English. Likewise, neologisms are frequent.

For historical reasons dating back to the rise of London in the nineth-century century, the form of language spoken in London and the East Midlands became standard English within the court, and ultimately the basis for generally accepted usage in law, government, literature and education within the UK. To a large extent, modern British orthography was standardized in Samuel Johnson's A Dictionary of the English Language (1755), although earlier writers also played a part in this and much has changed since 1755. Scotland, which was in parliamentary union with England only in 1707 (and returned in 1998) still has some independent aspects of standardisation, especially within its autonomous legal system.

Since the early xx century, numerous books by British authors that aim to serve as guides to English grammar and usage have been published, some of them have achieved enough acclaim to remain in circulation for long periods and have been reissued after several decades. These include, most notably, Fowler's Modern English Usage and The Complete Plain Words by sir Ernest Gowers. Detailed guides to many aspects of writing British English for publication are included in style guides from various publishers such as The Times newspaper, Oxford University Press and Cambridge University Press. The Oxford University Press guides were originally produced as a single page by Horace Henry Hart and were, at his time (1893) the first guide of its kind in English; they were gradually expanded and eventually published, first as Hart's Rules and, more recently (2002), as part of The Oxford Manual of Style. Comparable in authority and stature to The Chicago Manual of Style for American English, the Oxford Manual is a comprehensive standard for published British English, to which writers can refer in the absence of a specific document published by the publishing house that will publish your work.

Dialects

Dialects and accents vary between and within the four constituent countries of the UK. There are also differences in the English spoken by different socioeconomic groups in any particular region.

The main divisions are usually classified as English English (or English as spoken in England, which includes the English South English, Midlands English, and Northern Irish dialects), Welsh English, and Scottish English (not to be confused with Scottish (Germanic language)). The various British dialects also differ in the words they have borrowed from different languages. Scots and Northern English dialects include many words of Old Norse origin and some borrowing from Gaelic, although most of the structure and common words are conservatively Anglo-Saxon, hence 'kirk'; (church - church), 'beck' (stream - arroyo), 'feart' (feared - feared), 'fell' (hillside - hillside), 'kistie' (chest, box - chest, box), 'lang syne' (long ago - long ago), etc.

After the last study of English dialects (1949-1950), the University of Leeds started a new project. In May 2007 the Arts and Humanities Research Council awarded a grant to a team led by Sally Johnson, Professor of Linguistics and Phonetics at the University of Leeds, to study British regional dialects.

Differences between British English and American English

Differences between British English and American English could be categorized into 1. grammatical differences, 2. spelling differences, 3. pronunciation differences, and 4. vocabulary/lexicon differences.

1. Grammatical differences. We will highlight the following:

a) The verb have (to have): In British English we use have got, while in American we use the verb have >.

b) Irregular verbs: In British English the verb get would be get-got-got, while in American English, the verb is get-got -gotten.

c) Use of prepositions: at the weekend (British English), on the weekend (English Canadian and American); at Christmas (British English), on Christmas (Canadian and American English); from Monday to Friday (British English); Monday through Friday (Canadian and US English).

2. Spelling differences. The British spelling is the most commonly applied in any territory whose official language is English. The only exception is the United States and the territories formerly or currently colonized by the United States. There are some occasions when the American spelling and vocabulary are applied in the Canadian modality.

The main differences are:

a) spelling -our (UK English) versus -or (US English): colour versus color, favourite versus favorite.

b) spelling -ise and -yse (British English) versus -ize and -yze (Canadian and American English): organise versus organize, realise b> versus realize, analyse versus analyze.

c) single or double consonants: travellinging versus traveling, travell >ed versus traveled, traveller versus traveler

3. Pronunciation differences. In addition to the difference in accents, the main differences in pronunciation are:

a) The letter R: It is not pronounced at the end of a word or followed by another consonant in British English, but it is pronounced in the Irish (including Northern Ireland, which is part of the United Kingdom), Canadian and American modalities (for example, computer, architect, energy, curve, etc.)

b) The letter T: This letter is not often pronounced in Canadian and American English (what)

c) Vowels: The difference in the pronunciation of the letter A is the most significant. The phonetic sound /æ/ is very common in North American English, but not in British.

4. Differences in vocabulary.

This table contains some examples of lexical differences between British English and American English forms.