“reincident”
Though I’m aware of many US/UK English vocabulary differences, the grammar differences are harder to pin down sometimes. My mind was blown recently when I learned that US English is stricter about using “if I were walking down the street” rather than “if I was walking down the street”.
I also love that in US English, saying “that meal was quite good” is a much bigger compliment than in UK English, where it would be a pretty passive-aggressive insult.
Native British and American talking about their English differences.
Meanwhile, not native speakers who unintentionally use a mix of both and not even properly:
Well, I’d say it is proper for a non-native. I mean, I mix and match different languages if it strikes me fancy.
So, they’re using… Canadian English?
I’m American and I mix it up. Probably because my family kept a few Irish quirks such as “burnt” instead of burned. I also use amn’t.
I know that was a joke, but it really does depend on where you’re from and where you learnt your English from.
You would love the grammar discussions about Finnish dialects. I mean, I know I do. We have completely different verb forms (and a huge chunk of vocabularies) depending on the region.
Oh no siah. Singaporean English is definitely a no-no.
It was, yes.
My region of Canada switched from UK to US rules when I was in High School and then back, so I’m one of those native speakers who get the rules mixed up all the time and I like to poke fun at myself. =P
Russian breed of English is usually British mixed with a lot of americanisms. Occasionally there is a heavy accent, but the only quirks of pronunciation I have are z instead of th and v and w sounding the same. I never really got the difference between those, they feel samey.
And there’s also, apparently, the difference between i and i:, and h is supposed to sound less harsh, and same goes for r… I have no idea how people manage to develop Queen’s English accent as non-natives, making right noises with my throat is positively torturous.
The British reputation for politeness is completely undeserved when you take all the passive-aggressive indirect communication into account.
I’m mad as hell at US/UK usage differences and I’m not going to take it any
more.
As a Filipino, I use American English due to the country’s history, but with the rise of UK-localized video games, I sometimes slip in some British-isms.
As Aletheia knows from her editorial work on Rebels, between growing up on British children’s classics and having Britain as my home base for almost 20 years now, I’ve just never found that “anymore” looks right. Weird Americans.
I mean, if you want to take your linguistic cues from the folks who think “spotted dick” sounds appetizing, be my guest.
(Just teasing. I’m actually quite fond of UK English. I’ve been known to pay extra to have a newly released book shipped - er, I mean dispatched - from the UK so I don’t have to read the Americanised edition, where folks wear sweaters and sneakers instead of jumpers and trainers, and car parks are called parking lots, and philosophers are called sorcerers.)
(That said, I win Facebook arguments with my UK friends every 4th of July by mentioning 1) taxation without representation, 2) spotted dick.)
As a fun exercise: have your British friends pronounce a bunch of loan-words from Italian or Spanish with the letter “a”. Ask them to say, “The pasta mafia ate nachos with salsa.”
Usually it’s the Americans who pronounce our A’s as “aaaa,” like “baaa-th” vs “bahhh-th,” “paaa-ss” vs “pahhh-ss.” But with any word borrowed from a language that only has a long ahhh sound, the Brits make it into an aaaa. It’s really quite wonderful.
I actually got to grow up hearing that! My grandfather was born to a wealthy German Jewish family in the 1920s. For his protection, they sent him to boarding school in England before the whole family relocated to Boston. He forever spoke English with an accent that was half British and half Bostonian, and his pronunciation of “pasta” (my favorite food!) was painful to my ears.
I did have fun a few years back asking my acquaintances how to pronounce “tomato.” I’d never seriously heard anyone pronounce it “to-mah-to” before. (I still haven’t located any of the elusive tribe of people who say “po-tah-to,” and I’m starting to think that Ira Gershwin made them up.)
Spare a thought for my sons, growing up on the US-UK faultline. When he was three, my eldest was swinging a stick around yelling, “I’m a jet-eye, daddy! A jet-eye!”
I eventually figured out that he was putting a word he’d only heard from me through the translation filter of, “Daddy pronounces water as wadder and bottle as boddle, so therefore the proper pronunciation is…”
And I think you’re right about Gershwin.
Hm as a German I understood most of the polite sentences AS the passive aggressiv insults they are, in Germany IT IS offen similar.
And yet “excessive politeness” isn’t a stereotype of Germans to the same degree as Britons.