Separated by a Common Language

I was tweet-talking with Lane Greene this morning about whether Americans' love for/Britons' indifference to optional commas can be quantified. And so I did a little experiment. And so I'm going to tell you about it. For this I'm comparing the British National Corpus and the Corpus of Contemporary...

It's the last morning of my (BrE) holiday/(AmE) vacation—off to the airport in less than two hours. But Will W just pre-wrote for me most of a blog post, so I'm going to take advantage and get another post up before I land back in work reality. Here's what Will wrote: Struggling to see the screen,...

Will Fitzgerald has asked me more than once to cover British use of the adjective sorted. It has made an appearance on the blog before, as part of an Untranslatable October. But that short bit on it does not really give it its due. In the Corpus of Global Web-Based English, the word sorted is found...

Last week at Corpus Linguistics 2017, Rachele De Felice and I presented our research on thanking in US and UK corporate emails. We'll be writing that up for publication in the coming months. In the meantime, here's a tiny aspect of what we found, supplemented by some further thoughts. Our main question...

from the Guardian Today the Guardian reported on a new study by Bruno Gonçalves, Lucía Loureiro-Porto, José J. Ramasco, and David Sánchez (you can get the pdf here) entitled The End of Empire: the Americanization of English. There are interesting things to find in this study, but I'm taken back...

Today's post, I'm happy to say, is a guest post by Maddy Argy, an A-level student who's doing (BrE) work experience with me at the University of Sussex. I've asked her to find American-British differences that she could research and have introduced her to some of the tools we linguists use. I'm happy...

Those who follow the blog may remember that in February I was on BBC Radio 4's Word of Mouth, where fellow guest Matthew Engel and I debated the effect of American English on British English. Engel had written many newspaper columns on the topic, but at that point his book, That’s the way it crumbles:...

The scene behind the KFC near my Barbadian hotel is rather unlike the scene behind the KFC near my Brighton home As I mentioned in the last post, and as I have been wont to mention at any opportunity, I got to go to Barbados recently. It was my first time in the West Indies and it was fabulous—even...

I'm just back from a FABULOUS time at the Dictionary Society of North America conference. Fabulous not just because it was hosted by the University of the West Indies in Barbados (wheeeeee!), but because dictionary people are just the best people. No offen{c/s}e academic linguists, cognitive scientists,...

Before our irregularly scheduled blogpost, a couple of announcements: First, I'm on a (BrE) one-off Radio 4 program(me) tomorrow morning (10:30): Americanize! Why the Americanisation of English is a good thing, presented by Susie Dent. It should be available on iPlayer Radio after that. Second,...