Differences between American and British English. Are they so similar?

There are many varieties of English and no one version is correct. Today we are going to speak about the differences between American and British English.

The first and probably most obvious difference is our accents and how we stress and pronounce both vowels and consonants.

Take a look at the chart below and notice that even a lot of our spelling changes:  

British English	American English
Colour	Color
Favour	Favor
Centre	Center
Realise	Realize
Theatre	Theatre
Modelling	Modeling
Fulfil	Fulfill
Offence	Offense
Sizeable	Sizable
Ageing	aging

Many differences are found in the vocabulary used, in particular, phrasal verbs. The British would say; lift, film, biscuit, petrol, anti-clockwise, path... and the Americans would say; elevator, movie, cookie, gas, counterclockwise, sidewalk...

There are also words which exist in both language varieties but have completely different meanings, for example biscuit and bill. An American understands bill as money and English person, as an invoice. Biscuit for an American is what an English person calls a scone, and a biscuit for an English person is what Americans call a cookie. Now it is becoming clear why foreigners say the English language is so hard to learn!

Just to add to the confusion, the British “fill in” forms and the Americans “fill out”. Thus, even some of the prepositions change.

Now we are on the subject of verbs, the Americans use the present tense to express what a British person would express in the present perfect tense, for example:

-          American English: I lost the bus this morning.

-          British English: I’ve lost the bus this morning.

In conclusion, I would say that the key to writing English correctly is to decide which type of English you want to use and stick to it! Good luck!