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

[sakana17]

Another one I first came across in fanfiction written by Brits (or Commonwealthers) but now find in newspapers, etc.:

"he was sitting" --> "he was sat"
"she was standing" --> "she was stood"

[mad_maudlin]

got: yeah, the participle "gotten" is strictly USian. I'm not entirely sure what the differences are between got and lexical have otherwise.

Singular/plural: there is a rule for this! BrEnglish treats nouns referring to collectives (team, band, jury, Parliament) as grammatical plurals, while USEnglish treats them as grammatical singulars. This can be extended beyond words that have the collective semantics built into their meanings, so can say something like "England (=England's sportsball team) have lost again."

Things like "maths," though, that's just a case of the British term being morphologically plural where the US term is singular.

[twistedchick]

My sense of things FWIMBW is that 'gotten' is something that happened in the early 1800s on this side of the pond and stayed, and never happened in Britain. It's pretty firmly in the language by the time Louisa May Alcott was writing, which says to me that it was around when she was growing up before the Civil War.

Also, we say 'I have got to go to the store', which indicates need, and 'I got to the store' (past tense); 'he got into trouble' (simple past tense) and 'he has gotten into trouble again', (a version of present tense that might be something like present continuous if I knew what tenses were being called these days.) Anyway, it seems to be a tense marker as much as anything else.

[sineala]

I seem to recall hearing that "gotten" was older than "got" and that US dialects preserved the older forms, which is reasonable given that most US dialects also preserved, say, rhotacism.

I am not and have never been a syntactician, but your helping verb thing seems to me to be a pretty straightforward US/UK difference in verb phrase ellipsis -- I have never actually read an analysis of it, but clearly the UK version licenses some form of "do" in addition to the gap. Alas, everyone I can think of who still works on VPE (and thus would be likely to have some papers on the internet) is American and probably doesn't write about BrE; the most I found was this paper, which is mostly about a different phenomenon anyway. And I can't find anything that is for non-specialists.

(I realize now that this is probably not the question you were asking.)

[hesychasm]

Hmm, my English husband says he'd say "He lives on Baker Street," just as I (an American) would.

We often have "What? What does that mean?" sidebars to our normal conversations. But one memorable occasion was when a pot started boiling over on the stove and he kept telling me to "Turn off the hob! The hob!" I knew what that meant with my normal brain, but with the food getting ruined I was too flustered to understand what he wanted me to do for a few seconds. If he'd just left me well enough alone I'd have turned the darn stove off right away. (g)

[oxoniensis]

A couple of phrases that will instantly ping me as American, so I'll put them in reverse.

American English -> Brit English
Go wash your hair -> Go and wash your hair
[We (ie the average Brit - there will always be exceptions because we have a lot of different dialects) don't 'go do' something, we 'go and do' something.]

Gotten -> Got or Become
She's gotten lazy -> She's become lazy or She's grown lazy or She's got lazy

[runpunkrun]

This is fascinating. I hope you're going to share your phrasebook with us once it's mostly compiled?

[dafna]

As an American who writes mostly in UK fandoms, these are the ones I find myself having to consciously look out for:

1) "Very" alternates
Brits don't use "really" as much as Americans do. Instead, "rather" and "quite" are more common

2) "Got hold of" (UK)
Follows your "got" rule, but the whole phrase is used a lot

3) "Ring" or "Rang" (UK) instead of "Call" or "Called" (US)

4) "Right" (UK) instead of "OK" (US)
I don't mean that Brits don't use OK at all, but when Americans use OK as a sort of conversational clearing of the throat, Brits are more likely to use "Right". As in, "Right. Moving on." where an American would say "OK. Moving on."

5) Common UK slang terms (other than the obvious bloody, bugger, wanker etc)
"Knob" -- John definitely calls Sherlock this at least once a week
"Balls' up" -- A fuck up, but less rude than the American version
"In there" -- have a chance at sex, as in "I'm definitely in there"
"Fit" -- hot
"Innit" -- Isn't it, but used at the end of sentences where an American would say "right?" and often used ironically by upper class speakers as it's associated with lower-class speech.
"Bloke" -- used where Americans would use "guy", as in "he's a good bloke"

6) Cultural things appropriate to the character
For ex., most UK men are likely to be fans of "Top Gear" and so references from that show are likely, e.g. "Cock." "The best/worst XXXX in ... the ... world." And younger characters might use a lot of TOWIE slang such as "well jel" or "reem", but John wouldn't.

[buddleia]

The only examples in your list which strike me as US only English are Math and Gotten. The phrases don't strike me as one or the other, but that might be a London thing or, more likely, each one looks fine to me where one might not to you. Watching this post with interest!

[kindkit]

This is one I'm intrigued by, and if someone has more info about it I hope they'll chime in:

After "to need" or "to want," BrE (sometimes?) uses the -ing form of the verb where AmE uses the -ed form.

"He wants his head examining" --> "He needs his head examined."

Or, in a real example from series 3 of Cabin Pressure on the subject of airline safety videos:

"Anyone who needs the operation of a whistle explaining to them deserves to drown." --> "Explaining" would be "explained" in AmE.

[realpestilence]

I've always been bemused by "sport" as a singular activity. Brits engage in sport, Americans play sports.


Though there's nothing hard and fast any more. The popularity of various books, movies, tv shows, and their on-line fandoms encourage a great amount of crossover.

But you might want to look up "jumper", "house coat" and "bath robe" on amazon for photos thereof.

[aerye]

The one thing that stuck with me from writing Pros was that I was told Americans "figure" and Brits "reckon." As in, "I figured he was tired" and "I reckoned he was tired."

[montanaharper]

I've actually got 2500+ words of the opposite of this in a GDocs at the moment: "American English and Culture for the Non-American." (Which I probably ought to make USian rather than American, but whatever. It's not done yet.)

Things I haven't seen above:

brilliant, which is frequently used when we'd say something like great or wonderful

Brits contract differently than Americans do. Where we'd say "I haven't," they'd say "I've not," for instance.

proper / properly - this gets used a lot where I'd use "really," etc.

(Which reminds me, if you care about the punctuation differences, UK English puts any punctuation that doesn't belong to the quoted material outside the quotes, where we'd put commas and periods inside. Also, where we'd use an em-dash with no spaces around it, they use an en-dash with a space on either side...unless it's at the end of a sentence, in which case there's no trailing space. All of which is probably far more nitpicky than you care about, but I'm a typesetter so I fixate on that stuff.)

There are shades of meaning to a Brit's "quite" that aren't there for us. I've been told it can often be indicative of damning something with faint praise.

toilet - used to mean what we'd call a bathroom or restroom when in a public space, and frequently used for bathroom in a private home as well.

That's what I've got for strictly linguistic stuff off the top of my head.

[lobelia321]

Also: English people don't 'fix' food or drink. In American fics I often read 'He fixed dinner' or '...a sandwich' or somesuch.

English: 'He made dinner' and 'He made a sandwich'.

But: 'He fixed the broken tap.'

[nestra]

I'm watching a Russell Brand comedy special right now, and he's talking about being "sat" in front of the TV. "I was sat in front of the TV."

[aunty_marion]

One oddity of American speech I've noticed in reading, with slight reference to your first item, is that Americans often seem to reply to a question such as 'Have you got my number?' with 'Yes, I do!' which sounds very odd to English ears. 'Yes, I have!' would be more likely over here; 'Yes, I do!' would be the reply to 'Do you have my number?'. (In other words, the verbs in question and answer would agree.)

[aunty_marion]

Eh, reading comments reminds me of a couple of other things.

The English go shopping, not marketing; marketing means selling, here. And going 'to the market' would usually mean an outdoor (sometimes indoor) collection of small stalls, all selling different things; we'd usually just 'go shopping' or 'go to the shops' or to a specific shop - "I'm just off to Tesco [the butcher/greengrocer/ironmonger], do you need anything?" We don't go to 'the store[s]'; that's mostly only used in conjunction with another word/partial word, e.g. 'superstore' (huge supermarket), or 'department store' (such as Selfridges).

Another one is the propensity of some authors to leave 'Street', 'Road', etc off street names - far too often Harry Potter heads for Diagon. Nope, Diagon Alley, full name, please! Oxford? Oxford the town, Oxford Street, Oxford Circus? At the junction of Baker and Oxford... What? I live on (yes, it is 'on') Hargrave Park. Not Hargrave Road, which is up the main road a bit on the other side, and definitely not on Hargrave. Also, we don't generally have 'blocks'. From one street junction to another can cross a different number of roads on each side of the main road one is travelling along! For instance, to get from the bottom of my road to the junction of Holloway Road and Junction Road crosses my street and two others on this side; on the other side it crosses two. And not in the same places as the ones on this side, either.

[spainja]

Ones that have jumped out at me:

"hire" vs. "rent"

"lot" to refer to people--as in "You lot, come with me." or "The lot of you." (Americans would say "you guys" or "all of you" or, in some places, "y'all.")

"rude"--Brits use it to mean "vulgar" or "obscene"; Americans use it to mean "impolite".

"holiday" vs. "vacation"

What exactly "snogging" means--I've seen it in fics to refer to casual kissing, which isn't right.

"have a lie in" vs. "sleep in"

"do the washing up" vs. "wash the dishes" or "do the dishes"

"High Street" vs. "Main Street"

[jedusaur]

The comments on this are fascinating. I recently betaed and Yankpicked a 110k fic for a couple of authors from New Zealand, and the process involved a lot of "wait, you don't say that? REALLY?" moments from them. There were a lot of instances of the word "ages" (as in a thing taking ages to happen), which I suggested they replace with "forever," but they weren't quite satisfied with that as an equivalent. They used "though" in contexts most Americans wouldn't, and "round" instead of "around." And I found a lot of phrasings that weren't strictly un-American, but that I would expect to hear more from older adults (this was a hockey RPF fic, so the POV character and most other main characters were young men), or that I do hear, but much less often than the NZ folks used them. For example, they would use the word "so" as a superlative without a subsequent "that," e.g. "he's so anxious"--which we do once in a while, but I don't see it here as often as it cropped up in the fic. I should have kept a list as I went, because I know we discovered a lot of interesting differences in language habits that I've now forgotten.

When I have some free time to spend transcribing and analyzing YouTube interviews, I'm planning to pull together a post on language patterns of Russians speaking English as a second language, because hockey RPF fandom has a lot of Russian characters and a lot of authors who can't write their dialogue believably. (This includes myself; my main reason for doing this is so I can include Russian characters in my own fic without freaking out too much about getting their speech patterns wrong.) I think that one Sherlock fic is the only time I've really made an effort to Britishize (Britishise?) my writing--I didn't have as many Britpicking resources or as much commitment to quality in fic when I wrote in other non-American fandoms.

[isilya]

"Quite" as a modifier means very different things:

UK/Commonwealth: quite pretty is less pretty than pretty.
US: quite pretty means very pretty.

Nonplussed:

UK: surprised and confused, taken aback, unsure how to react.
US: unperturbed.

I'm trying to avoid using both quite and nonplussed in my writing as they seem destined to poorly convey my meaning.

[kindkit]

This is a great idea, and I think it will help a lot of people, but I'd add the caveat that no amount of do-it-yourself Britpicking is ever really enough. I'm a USian who's written primarily in British fandoms for years. Most of what I watch (TV and films) is British, and so is a lot of what I read, so I've absorbed a lot of the vocabulary and constructions. But if I'm going to post any kind of serious fic (by which I mean long or complex enough that it seems worth careful editing), I have it Britpicked. And without fail, the Britpicker catches errors.

This is probably why I get all frothy with poorly-suppressed outrage whenever I read professional fiction, by an American but with British characters/setting, that has not been edited to remove the Americanisms. Fanfiction I'm a little more forgiving of, but enough Americanisms will make me backbutton, and even just a few in an otherwise excellent story make me wish the author had gone to that little extra effort.

[louiselux]

Sorry if that has been mentioned before and I've just missed it, but one word that to me is a giveaway is 'quit'.

As far as I can tell (as a Brit) Americans will say 'quit it' and Brits will say 'stop it'. 'Quit' as a command is not used, it's always 'stop'. However (there always is a however, right) British people might well say 'I've quit my job' or 'I've quit smoking'.

[exceptinsects]

Supposed to/meant to. As in, "what's that guy dressed up as?" US: "He's supposed to be Marilyn Monroe." UK: "He's meant to be Marilyn Monroe."

[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!

[jamjar]

There's also a tendency to add an s on things when shortening them in informal English. Becky is Bex, Amy is Ames, Otto is Ots, See you later is Laters*, etc. It's not hard and fast, but, for example, "Sherls" would be as likely as "Sherl" as a short form of Sherlock. (If he wouldn't, you know, throw an utter strop at anyone daring to shorten his name).

I think this is one of those things that started as an SE England thing, but has spread up north due to TV).

*Well, "La'ers", I suppose, since I've never heard it with the T pronounced, only ever a glottal stop.