Separated by a Common Language

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, sup...

from the GuardianToday the Guardian reported on a new study by Bruno Gonçalves, Lucía Loureiro-Porto, José J. Ramasco, David Sánchez (you can get the pdf here) entitled The End of Empire: the Americanization of English. There are interesting thin...

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 h...

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...

The scene behind the KFC near my Barbadian hotelis rather unlike the scene behind the KFC near my Brighton homeAs 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 t...

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...

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 av...