Separated by a Common Language

I've studied the word please off and on for a few years now.* Currently, I'm trying to finish up a study that I started an embarrassing number of years ago. Now that I've returned to it, I have the pleasure of reading all the works that have been published on related topics in the meantime....

Today's xkcd is timely... ...considering that Cambridge Linguistics Extra (at Linguist List) yesterday published a blogpost by me on linguistic misinformation. Click through for more... The post is a promotion for my series in the journal English Today. So far, half of the series has been...

A while ago, I coined the term AVIC ('American Verbal Inferiority Complex'), to refer to an American tendency to find British English (or at least standard English English) superior to their own way of speaking.  Having done a bit of reading about accent attitudes this week, I'm wondering whether...

I’m very happy to welcome my first guest blogger, a student who’s finished the work for her Sussex degree in English Language and Film Studies, which included a dissertation comparing British irony and sarcasm to American—the latter of which has seen more academic attention. Rather than twiddling...

My first out-of-North-America experience was when I moved to South Africa at the age of 27, in order to take up a post at a large, English-medium university there. I'd been teaching for three years at my (AmE) graduate school by that time, and my teaching in South Africa was going fairly well, but...

I was tracking back to sites where visitors to this site have come from (as you do, if you're a nosy procrastinator like me), and was taken to the blog of an American surgeon, Orac, and his[?] post on linguistics differences, particularly in signs that he noticed on a recent trip to London. Those...

The hardest thing to cope with for an English learner of Swedish is not the gender system in nouns, nor the voiceless palatal-velar fricative, nor the verb-second syntax. No, the toughest thing to learn is how to make do without a word for 'please'. I end up saying Tack ('thank you') in all sorts...

Paul pointed out this article and discussion on BBCNews about the tendency for Americans to assume that the British are brighter (and their lack of recognition of non-RP accents as British). Better Half says that he's not sure whether Americans think he's smarter because of his accent, but he does...

The British are masters and mistresses of understatement, one is told. Yeah, well, maybe. For your consideration, my current list of most hated, painfully overused words: essential fanatical excellence I've grumped about excellence once before, and I'm sure that it's come in from US corporate-speak....

Bbrug pointed out an article on British and American authors' renditions of the other dialect's speech on the Telegraph website. Not being a Telegraph reader, I was grateful for the link. The author starts with the following premise (BrE: premiss): America has become more interested in the outside...

A recent list of American (well, North Carolinian) university student slang includes the word chav, defining it as: CHAV - working class boor. From British slang. "“This club used to be nice, but now it's full of chavs." I find this borrowing of the British term a bit sad, since it necessarily involves...