There is noticeable variation in the vocabularies of American English

American English

American English is a set of dialects of the English language used mostly in the United States. Approximately two-thirds of the world's native speakers of English live in the United States....

 and British English

British English

British English, or English , is the broad term used to distinguish the forms of the English language used in the United Kingdom from forms used elsewhere...

. Definitive analysis is problematic, but thorough research can reveal useful data and evidence of the differences. The table on this page shows evidence of regional variation between American and British English.

Change in the vocabulary (lexical change) of a dialect arises from both internal and external pressures. Of external influence, crossing of terms between American and British English is not wholly restricted one-way, but American English is the predominant worldwide influence.

Analysing the differences

The analysis of variation within a language is a research area of Linguistics

Linguistics

Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. Linguistics can be broadly broken into three categories or subfields of study: language form, language meaning, and language in context....

. The technical term for a vocabulary is a lexicon

Lexicon

In linguistics, the lexicon of a language is its vocabulary, including its words and expressions. A lexicon is also a synonym of the word thesaurus. More formally, it is a language's inventory of lexemes. Coined in English 1603, the word "lexicon" derives from the Greek "λεξικόν" , neut...

. Research into lexical variation (the variation in words used) between two dialects of the same language employs several methods, including empirical inquiry into the actual language used by an appropriate sample of speakers and statistical corpus

Corpus linguistics

Corpus linguistics is the study of language as expressed in samples or "real world" text. This method represents a digestive approach to deriving a set of abstract rules by which a natural language is governed or else relates to another language. Originally done by hand, corpora are now largely...

 analysis (analysis of large bodies of 'naturally occurring' data, i.e. the lexical content ('words') of books, television, newspapers, etc.).

Limitations of analysis

• Language is constantly changing: the accuracy of the data may degrade quickly after the date when the research was done.

• The picture is further complicated by the variation (due to region, age, gender, social norms and many other factors) within the national dialects.

• Globalisation has accelerated the rate-of-change to English worldwide: a list of lexical variation should not be regarded as an authority on current differences, but rather as evidence of variation by which dialects can be distinguished.

• It is not a straightforward matter to identify items as equivalent. David Crystal identifies some of the problems of classification on the facing page to his list of American English/British English lexical variation, and states "this should be enough to suggest caution when working through an apparently simple list of equivalents".

Sources

• Andrew Radford, Martin Atkinson, David Britain, Harald Clahsen, Andrew Spencer, Linguistics: An Introduction (Cambridge University Press, 1999)
• Bas Aarts, April M. S. McMahon (eds), "Part I: Methodology" in The Handbook of English Linguistics (Blackwell, 2006)
• Elena Tognini-Bonelli, Corpus Linguistics at Work (John Benjamins, 2001)
• J. K. Chambers, Peter Trudgill, Natalie Schilling-Estes (eds), The Handbook of Language Variation and Change (Blackwell, 2004)
• David Crystal,The Language Revolution (Themes of the 21st Century) (Polity Press 2004)
• David Crystal, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of The English Language. 2nd Edition. (Cambridge University Press, 2003)