Peculiarities of British and American Variants in the English Language

Contents

Introduction
Chapter I Historical background of the English Language
I. 1. A short history of the origins and development of English
I. 2. Varieties of English
I. 3. English as a global language
I.4. Writing system
Chapter II Peculiarities of British and American variants in the English language
II. 1. Peculiarities of American and British English and their differences
II. 2. American and British English lexical differences
II. 3. Grammatical Peculiarities of American and British English
II. 4. Social and cultural differences
Conclusion
Bibliography
Appendix

Introduction

The theme of my Diploma paper is “Peculiarities of British and American variants in the English Language”.
The purpose of my Diploma paper is to investigate peculiarities of British and American variants in the English Language.
Every language allows different kinds of variations: geographical or territorial, perhaps the most obvious, stylistic, the difference between the written and the spoken form of the standard national language and others. It is the national language of England proper, the USA, Australia, New Zealand and some provinces of Canada. It is the official language of Wales, Scotland, in Gibraltar and on the island of Malta. Modern linguistics distinguishes territorial variants of a national language and local dialects. Variants of a language are regional varieties of a standard literary language characterized by some minor peculiarities in the sound system, vocabulary and grammar and by their own literary norms.
The task of our Diploma paper is to reveal the main peculiarities of British and American variants in the English Language; i.e. when we speak about the English language in general, we often ignore some very important differences between several varieties of this language. Some people argue that it is the same language and whichever variant a person speaks, he is sure to be understood everywhere. This is only

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