Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="johnsemlak" data-source="post: 2451618" data-attributes="member: 7233">Somewhat extensive notes here on the subject.<a href="http://www.scit.wlv.ac.uk/~jphb/american.html" target="_blank">http://www.scit.wlv.ac.uk/~jphb/american.html</a>Ah, a topic of endless discussion in TEFL teaching rooms.I have a theory that runs like this--British and American English are the most different in areas of vocabulary that developed in the late 1800s and early 1900s, when geography separated the countries a bit more than it does in the modern world.  At that time a lot of new technology appeared (particularly household items and other various consumer goods) and words needed to be invented to describe them.  And often different words were used on either side of the ocean.  For example, much of hte common vocabulary that describes a car is diffenerent.  Also, most vocabulary describing sports is rather different (most popular sports became organized around the world in the late 1800s spurred by urbanization).  E.g. 'pitch' rather than 'field';  Football 'kit' rather than 'uniform', etc.Vocabulary from before this period tends to be more similar, since most of it was created before the colonists arrived in the Americas.  And since WWII, increasing globalization and in particular the global mass media/entertainment (especially the worldwide popularlity of American film, and perhaps more important, TV) and now the internet are making the languages more similar again, and thus we're seeing fewer different words (outside of slang, perhaps).</blockquote>

Verification