Linguistics

[resonant]

I'm compiling an American-to-British phrasebook (because reasons Sherlock). You can find decent dictionaries online (nappy, lorry, etc., etc.) but I'm not so much finding speech patterns -- word choices, syntax, where an American says 'on' and a Brit says 'in,' that kind of thing.

Oddly enough, most of what I've got here (that didn't come from Arctic Monkeys songs) came to my attention because I'd be reading a story in a fandom with an American canon, and I'd hit a phrase that made me go, "This author must be British." (The drawback of this is that some of it might be Australian or something.)

Anybody want to offer input? Here's what I've got (American on the left, British on the right).

Brits use a lot of 'got,' but I can't quite formulate a rule.

to see if you had my number -----> to see if you'd got my number

(also Americans say 'gotten')

Brits don't like to let helping verbs hang out alone.

"You'd eat a horse." "I have." ---> "You'd eat a horse." "I have done."

"That joke gets old." "It must." ---> "That joke gets old." "It must do."

The two dialects handle prepositions differently.

"in the hospital" ---> "in hospital"

"lives on Baker Street" ---> "lives in Baker Street"

Different vocabulary.

"we went to college together" ---> "we went to uni together"

"toss it" or "throw it away" ---> "bin it"

There are a number of things that Brits treat as plural that Americans treat as singular.

"the band wasn't very good" ---> "the band weren't very good"

"I'm no good at math" ---> "I'm rubbish at maths"

"the jury wasn't paying attention" ---> "the jury weren't paying attention"

Comments

[surexit]

I'm a mid-twenties Londoner and I'll fairly naturally say 'gotten' as the past participle instead of 'got', which is due to exposure to American media and also hypercorrection, so that's something to bear in mind. My mum will pick me up on it, so it definitely sounds strange to at least one member of the older generation, but it's really not a hard-and-fast rule.

Here's the British Council explaining have got. For teenagers, but still. :D The rule is pretty straightforward: anything that you possess, either abstract or concrete, and some appointments and things like that, can use 'have got'. It's almost always contracted, definitely not used in formal written language, and pretty irritating to try to remove from your speech. *was supposed to teach American English one time*

Maths isn't plural. (E.g., 'maths is my favourite subject'.)

Also to note, 'British' is not a particularly useful descriptor of the language. I know you;re just going for broad ideas, hence the usage of American which is also a very wide category, buuuuuut Scottish/Welsh/Irish English are such different beasts from English English in some respect, and there's a bit of a nasty history of erasure of those forms of English from discussions of British English, that it might be a good idea to specify that you're looking for English English?

Aaaand there's loads of other stuff I'm sure, but I'm going out for dinner just now. I will see if I can think of anything else helpful!

[resonant]

I did have a vague understanding of Britain as encompassing more than just England, but I see I'm tending to misuse it -- partly because it gets confusing distinguishing 'English' the people from 'English' the language, partly because when I worked with the guys from Preston I got into the habit of referring to all my co-workers collectively as 'the Brits.' (Except for the manager they hired shortly before I left, whose name I can't even remember because in our house we always referred to him as 'the loud American.')

[surexit]

It is a bit confusing! 'British' is quite rarely used by actual UKers, tbh, so actually that's quite possibly something to note when writing people from the UK - places where an American would say 'British', I personally am likely to be more specific. But yeah, it's worth being a little careful about because the standard American usage of British that I've observed tends to actually mean English, often specifically southern English (which is kind of what you're using it for here), and the power imbalance in the UK is heavily tipped towards the English in quite a few ways (the south of England is by far the most economically prosperous, southern English accents are the highest prestige, the government is in London, media focuses on London, blah blah blah etc.), so the implicit erasure of the other parts of Britain is sometimes a bit grating.

Anyway! I will shut up. This graphic illustrates some other speech differences, and is kind of hilarious.