Влияние различий между британским и американским вариантами английского языка на качество понимания речи

 My name is Olga Kopytova. I’m a student of the 10th form from school №172 in Nizhniy Novgorod.  I would like to introduce my research work “The effect of differences between British and American English on the quality of the speech understanding».

The aim of my work is to study the causes of differences between British and American English, and to show these differences in practice based on the texts of the two English songs.

Based on the aim, I needed to solve the following tasks:

1. To collect and study material on the topic that interests me
2. To learn the basic causes between the British and American English
3. To tell about the most notable differences between these variants of the language
4. To show on the base of songs in English, what the impact of the described differences on the quality of understanding of oral and written speech is
5. To try to understand what variant of the English language is more often used in the modern world

To show in practice the main differences between BrE and AmE, I will compare the two English-language songs: the song of the legendary band The Beatles - “Getting Better” and the song of a modern American one Limp Bizkit – “It’ll be OK”.

In the song of the Beatles we can hear a perfect British accent, which observes the correct pronunciation, you can even so to say, the traditional pronunciation of words. It is also worth looking at the text of this song in order to understand that in the text the correct spelling of words and grammatical rules are used: correct use of these modal constructions as "have got to", "used to" and "have to", the times of the Present Perfect Tense and the Past Simple Tense and, of course, no slang.

In the song of the American band in the first line we face with the incorrect use of the time of Present Perfect and Past Simple, where by grammatical rules the Present Perfect should be used.  

In the first lines of the two songs we face with the most fundamental difference between British and American English, the pronunciation of the letter "t" and the letter combination "tt". And in both songs the same phrase as "getting better" shows this distinction. In the British version this phrase will be pronounced as [ˈgetɪŋ ˈbetə] and in the American one as [ˈgedɪŋ ˈbedər]. The same distinction applies to all the words of this song, in which the letter "t" or the combination "tt" are between two vowels.

As for pronunciation, while listening to the song of the American group, we can hear a consonant letter "r" standing at the end of  words would be spoken, in contrast to British English.  We can see this distinction in the verb "to wonder" which in the American version of the language would be spoken as [ˈwʌndər] and in British as [ˈwʌndə].

The difference in pronunciation also affects the third form of the verb “to forget” - "forgotten". If you listen to how the singer of the American band pronounces the verb, then we will hear [fəˈgʌdn], while in the British variant of the language the same word will be pronounced as [fəˈgɒtn].

In the selected song Limp Bizkit we can also observe the abundant use of slang, which we won’t meet in the old songs of the British groups, for example.

Also in the text of the American group we can deal with the fact that the ending "-ing" will be written as "-in'" and is pronounced [n], for example.

These differences affect the understanding of the lyrics, but not very much, because most of them are unchanged.

So, researching the topic, I came to the following conclusions:

1. The main cause of differences between British and American English was the influence of mass immigration of the European population to North America. Over time, American English became much easier to communicate and understand each other.
2. The differences between British and American English primarily affect pronunciation and vocabulary, grammar and spelling of words.
3. The differences described in my work cause some difficulties in understanding of spoken and written speech. But such difficulties can’t arise, if you know the key differences in the grammar and spelling of these variants of the language.
4. In today’s society the most popular variant among the people, particularly the youth, is the American English. These is because we communicate with people around us and live in a very rich way of life, so in a colloquial speech we often use all sorts of slang expressions, Americanisms and more simplified grammar and pronunciation in order to save our time.