Pronunciation

In American English we have r-coloured fully articulated vowels, in the combinations: ar, er, ir, or, ur, our, etc. In BE the sound [ɔ] corresponds to the AE [ʌ], e.g. not. In BE before fricatives and combinations with fricatives the letter a is pronounced as [a:], in AE it is pronounced [æ], e.g. class, dance, answer, fast, etc.

There are some differences in the position of the stress: add ' ress – ' address, la ' boratory – ' laboratory, re ' cess – ' recess, re ' search – ' research, in ' quiry – ' inquiry, ex ' cess – ' excess. Some words in BE and AE have different pronunciation, e.g. clerk [kla:k] – [klə:rk], neither ['naiðə] – ['ni:ðə], schedule ['shedju:l] – ['skedju:l].

Punctuation

Periods (.): A period is used after initials of abbreviations. Americans tend to write U. S., U. N., Mr., Mrs., Dr. etc., while most British will write US, UN, Mr, Mrs, Dr (or even D’r), etc., following the rule that a period is used only when the last letter of the abbreviation is not the last letter of the complete word. However, many British writers would tend to write without a full stop other abbreviations, such as Prof, etc, eg, and so on.

Quotations: Americans will usually put commas and periods inside quotation marks, whereas Britons put the punctuation inside if it belongs to the quote and outside otherwise.

Letter-writing: When starting a formal letter, Americans usually write a colon after the greeting (“Dear Sir:”), while Britons usually write a comma (“Dear Sir,”).

Dates: 11^th of September 2001 is put down as 11/09/01 in British English and 09/11/01 in American English.

# (often called a hash) is used for ‘number’ in American English, but not in British English (№).

Spelling

The American spelling is in some respects simpler than its British counterpart, in other respects just different. Some other spelling differences between the variants are shown in Table 7 below.

Table 7.