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British English vs American EnglishI grew up learning and using British English. I was born in the 60s in england and moved to Australia with my family before starting primary school. In those days, we all learnt the British English. I don?t think I even came across American English until I was in high school, and then it was always an argument about which was the correct spelling. I believe the word ?colour? was the first word that I came across that could be spelled differently, as in American English, ie, ?color?. I have resisted the push to spell the American way, as I don?t believe it is really correct, but rather just an easy/lazy way for some people to write. In a lot of instances, the American English just seems to me to be a shorter way of writing. There are many differences which involve the dropping or changing of one letter. For example, words ending with ?our? in English, become, ?or? in American, such as: flavour/flavor; colour/color; parlour/parlor; etc. Words that have a double letter in British English, only have one letter in American, such as: travelling/traveling; shovelled/shoveled; etc. With the double letter example, it is when we are adding ?-ing? ?-ed? ?-er? ?-or? or ?-est? to the existing word, (which the Americans spell the same: travel, shovel), that the Americans do not double the letter ?l?, whereas, in British English, we do. In some words, they change an ?s? into a ?z? as in: realise/realize; colonise/colonize; standardise/standardize; etc. I think this is because they like to write it as it sounds, or phonetically. The ?s? in the above words, all sound like a ?z?, so that?s why they spell it that way. I can go on to list all of the differences between British and American English spellings, but it would take far more than the 500-700 words which are required for this article, as there are so many. Other differences between the two include pronunciation, grammar, punctuation, idioms, formatting of dates and numbers and a small number of words which have completely different meanings in the two dialects or are even unknown or not used in one of the dialects.eg, fanny, blacktop. The question is, why have these differences come about? Apart from regional variations which naturally develop, Noah Webster contributed towards formalising the differences between British and American English when he wrote the first American dictionary which was published in 1828 with the intention of showing that people in the united states spoke a different dialect from Britain, much like a regional accent. It was predicted by Henry Sweet in 1877 that within a century, American English, Australian English and British English would be mutually intelligible, but what he hadn?t taken into consideration, was that increased worldwide communication through radio, television, the Internet and globalization (or should that be ?globalisation??) has had the effect of reducing the tendency to regional variation. This can also result in either some variations becoming extinct (ie, the wireless, superseded by, the radio) or in the acceptance of wide variations as ?perfectly good English? everywhere. Although, the idiosyncrasies still remain at the core of the dialect. The difficulty that I have these days, is deciding on which way to spell something, as in the word, ?globalization?. The American way of spelling has seeped into our culture so much that I no longer think that using the ?z? in ?globalization? is wrong, it is now just another way of spelling it. I think the tendency for me is to still spell words that I have used for a long time, the British way, as in ?realisation?, but for words which are more recent additions or used more frequently now, I tend to use the more recent way of spelling, as in ?globalization?. I also find the ?z? more difficult to use on a keyboard than an ?s?, so I tend to use ?s? more frequently. Although American and British English are mutually intelligible, there are still enough differences to cause occasional misunderstandings, or at times, embarrassment, as some words that are quite innocent in one dialect, may be considered very vulgar or rude in the other.
