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The American spelling is from French, and American speakers generally approximate the French pronunciation as / n ɑː ˈ iː v (ə) t eɪ /, whereas the British spelling conforms to English norms, as also the pronunciation / n ɑː ˈ iː v (ə) t i / [121] [122].
Differences in pronunciation between American English (AmE) and British English (BrE) can be divided into . differences in accent (i.e. phoneme inventory and realisation).See differences between General American and Received Pronunciation for the standard accents in the United States and Britain; for information about other accents see regional accents of English.
Several pronunciation patterns contrast American and British English accents. The following lists a few common ones. Most American accents are rhotic, preserving the historical /r/ phoneme in all contexts, while most British accents of England and Wales are non-rhotic, only preserving this sound before vowels but dropping it in all other contexts; thus, farmer rhymes with llama for Brits but ...
Spelling pronunciations are also possible, in which all words that historically contain schwas in their orthography are pronounced as /z/, even when the usual pronunciation would be /s/. English is less prone to perfect liaison-style sandhi than Portuguese, Spanish and French might be. Often, two identical or very similar consonants follow each ...
The regular spelling system of Old English was swept away by the Norman Conquest, and English itself was supplanted in some spheres by Norman French for three centuries, eventually emerging with its spelling much influenced by French. English had also borrowed large numbers of words from French, and kept their French spellings.
The following is a handy reference for editors, listing various common spelling differences between national varieties of English. Please note: If you are not familiar with a spelling, please do some research before changing it – it may be your misunderstanding rather than a mistake, especially in the case of American and British English spelling differences.
In sociolinguistics, an accent is a way of pronouncing a language that is distinctive to a country, area, social class, or individual. [1] An accent may be identified with the locality in which its speakers reside (a regional or geographical accent), the socioeconomic status of its speakers, their ethnicity (an ethnolect), their caste or social class (a social accent), or influence from their ...
men or boys (but increasingly used for people of either sex; in the singular it still almost exclusively refers to a male, "Guys" has become a more popular phrase in the UK) (US & UK: guys) one's friends ("the chaps") (US & UK: the guys )