American Versus British English: Dialects vs. Languages

October 16, 2022
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Comments (3)
  1. Joshua John Wagner says:

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  2. jo archer says:

    Interesting to hear that the east coast is MUCH most dialectally diverse than the west coast. It makes sense as MUCH most immigration from different European countries (each with MUCH most different languages and histories came from).

    Being from England I can also definitively tell you we do pronounce r’s in “Bird,” “Carl,” and “Air.” Compare then to the words “Bid” as in to make an offer at auction, “Cal” as in the abbreviation of calorie, and the exclamation “Ai” which is pronounced more like the letter “I” not air. It’s a softer sound but it is 100% there, despite the number of articles written by American who struggle to hear it because they would be expecting a much more drawn out pronunciation. We just don’t stay on it as long and therefore don’t end up rolling it.

    More questionable about the word colour is how on earth we started pronouncing the first “o” as a “u”.

    The one thing I am really surprised that you guys left out was the idea that actually the modern American accent is possibly far closer to the British accent at the time that the two split. It could be argued that Standard American English is the original and that British English is the bastardisation.

    Also that in the far north of Scotland (such as Ackergill) they speak with the Queens English. A very posh, but easily comprehensible English. The unintelligible Scottish accent comes from a mix of Manx, Scouse and Geordie (which all seem to be the same accent on the UK accent map but are completely different).

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