Research Paper Introduction - American and British English

Introduction English carries the story of its origin as an independent language in its name. The “Engl-“ part of the word goes back to the Angles, a Germanic tribe that invaded and colonized much of Britain during the 5th and 6th centuries. The “-ish” part means “belonging to”: in this case, the language that belonged to the Angles – the “Angle-ish” language. The English language descended directly from the speech of the Anglo-Saxons. English has developed during the course of the past thousand years from old English to Middle English to modern English. (Grolier Academic Encyclopedia, 1988)

The Modern English period has already lasted longer than either of its predecessors. As the English language continues to develop, it also became the second language of many countries therefore bringing the different dialects of the English language.

British English is the broad term used to distinguish the forms of the English language used in the United Kingdom from forms used elsewhere. The Oxford English Dictionary applies the term to English "as spoken or written in the British Isles; the forms of English usual in Great Britain". American English is a set of dialects of the English language used mostly in the United States. Approximately two-thirds of the world's native speakers of English live in the United States. (Wikipedia, 2014)

British and American English diverged as soon as the American colonies were founded at the start of the 17th century. Nonetheless, because of the constant interchange of people and books across the ocean, American English never developed beyond being a dialect of English. With the advent of records, cinema, radio and television, the two brands of English have begun to draw back together again. Britons and Americans probably speak more alike today than they did 50 or 60 years ago. (Grolier Academic Encyclopedia, 1988)

Lexical describes something concerning words or vocabulary. Orthography is the art of writing words with the proper letters according to standard usage. Orthography is a standardized system for using a particular writing system to write a particular language. It includes rules of spelling. (Wikipedia, 2014)

British and American English are two different dialects of English and they have a lot of differences. For instance, they might have words that have the same denotations yet they spell it in a different way. Another example is having different names for same things. These differences may refer to Lexical and Orthographic differences.
We chose this to be our research topic because even we, the researchers are having slight difficulties in understanding the differences of British and American vocabulary considering that some of the words they use have different spellings and terms but brings the same denotations. For instance, in British they spell it as "favourite" and in American they spell it as "favorite". In British they call it "lift" and in American they call it "elevator". These differences can be a reason as to why people have a hard time learning the English Language. We also chose this topic because we want to broaden our knowledge about British and American English.