American and British English Pronunciation Differences

American And British English Pronunciation Differences

Differences in pronunciation between American English (AmE) and British English (BrE) can be divided into:

  • differences in accent (i.e. phoneme inventory and realisation). See differences between General American and Received Pronunciation for the standard accents in the United States and Britain; for information about other accents see regional accents of English speakers.
  • differences in the pronunciation of individual words in the lexicon (i.e. phoneme distribution). In this article, transcriptions use Received Pronunciation (RP) to represent BrE and General American (GAm) and to represent AmE.

In the following discussion

  • superscript A2 after a word indicates the BrE pronunciation of the word is a common variant in AmE
  • superscript B2 after a word indicates the AmE pronunciation of the word is a common variant in BrE

Read more about American And British English Pronunciation Differences:  Weak Forms, Miscellaneous Pronunciation Differences

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