Anke Werckmeister

American and British English Differences with a Look at Their History Anke Werckmeister

Seminar paper from the year 2008 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Other, grade: 2,0, Free University of Berlin (Institut für Englische Philologie), course: VS Sociolinguistics and Varieties of English II: English as a pluricentric language, language: English, abstract: Both British English and American English are interesting topics to look at but to look at them in a contrastive way is even more interesting because here you have to take the history of both varieties into consideration to see where the differences lie and why they became two distinctive varieties. Now you have to keep in mind that America was settled by British people but yet Americans now do not speak British English and then voted for their own way of speaking and pronouncing English. But how did that come? It was simply impossible not to have a different variety of English in America since English was exposed to different external factors such as other existing languages and a new environment compared to English in England and Great Britain. Hence with the Declaration of Independence in 1776 as a political separation from the mother country a linguistic separation needed to follow to finally divorce the USA from England which was important for the Americans because they wanted to have their own national identity.