American English vs British English

Vocabulary
US vs UK 
Vacation vs Holiday
Jelly vs Jam
Hood vs Bonnet
Trunk vs Boot
Apartment vs Flats
Sneakers vs trainers

Accent
Queens English
oxford English
BBC English
Northern
Southern
Midland
Western

Collective nouns 
American English, collective nouns are singular e.g. staff refers to a group but In British English collective nouns can be singular or plural e.g. the team are playing tonight

Past tense verbs 
Americans tend to use the (-ed) ending. British English tend to use (-t) ending

Spelling
UK vs US
Odour vs Odor
Colour vs Color
Centre vs Center
Litre vs Liter
Flavour vs Flavor
Humour vs Humor
Analyse vs Analyze
Paralyse vs Paralyze
Traveller vs Traveler
Defence vs Defense

In 1776 Americans and British people had very similar accents, they had not yet diverged. The British accent has changed drastically but the American accent has only changed subtly. The accent  was largely rhotic. Around the time of the American  revolution the non rhotic R became prevelant in upper class English

Language change

Notes 

All languages change over time, and vary from place to place. They may change as a result of social or political pressures, such as invasion, colonisation and immigration. New vocabulary is required for the latest inventions, such as transport, domestic appliances and industrial equipment, or for sporting, entertainment and leisure pursuits. But a language can also change by less obvious means.

Language also changes very subtly whenever speakers come into contact with each other. No two individuals speak identically: people from different geographical places clearly speak differently, but even within the same small community there are variations according to a speaker’s age, gender, ethnicity and social and educational background. Through our interactions with these different speakers, we encounter new words, expressions and pronunciations and integrate them into our own speech. Even if your family has lived in the same area for generations, you can probably identify a number of differences between the language you use and the way your grandparents speak. Every successive generation makes its own small contribution to language change and when sufficient time has elapsed the impact of these changes becomes more obvious.

Listen to these recordings in this section, which illustrate important, recent changes in spoken English. Consider the following statement and click on the highlighted words for more information about particular types of language change:

“we couldn’t listen to the latest tunes because we hadn’t a wireless”

we couldn’t listen to the latest tunes because we hadn’t a wireless

The pronunciation of the word tunes here is very revealing. Many older speakers in the UK would pronounce a <y> sound in between the initial consonant and vowel of a word like tune or dune — so that they sound like ‘tyoon’ and ‘dyoon’ respectively. Younger speakers are far more likely to blend the consonant and <y> sounds into a <ch> and <j> sound respectively. Thus the word tune might sound something like ‘choon’ and the word dune might be pronounced like June.

For some people, the construction we hadn’t a wireless might sound unusual. Younger speakers in many parts of the UK are nowadays far more likely to say we hadn’t got a radio or we didn’t have a radio. This is an example of grammatical change — a subtle process and not always obvious to listeners. Because grammatical change appears to spread more slowly than lexical change, older, more conservative forms of speech might sometimes remain present in some regional dialects, but not in others. The use of the second person pronouns thou, thee, thy and thine, for instance, sound old-fashioned to most of us, but are still heard in parts of northern England — although even there they are becoming increasingly associated with older speakers.

old speech

Doubt thou the stars are fire
Doubt that the sun doth move
Doubt truth to be a liar
But never doubt I love

-Shakespeare in Hamlet

In modern English this mean that:
You can doubt that the starts are made of fire
Doubt that the sun moves
Doubt that truth is a lie
But you can not question my love.

 He is trying to say that you can doubt all these proven things that have evidence behind them but you can not doubt his love.
The syntax of the quote is not that different to what we would use now although we have added words in.
The word 'doth' is no longer used in modern English we use the word 'do' instead. Or in this case we would say doubt that the sun does move.
Shakespeare also uses never doubt I love where as we would say my love.

articles on language change

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/13/literally-broken-english-language-definition
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/may/01/icymi-english-language-is-changing-faster-than-ever-says-expert
The first article is about the change of the definition of literally. The original meaning of the word was that something was in a literal manner and exact. However in recent years the word has changed meaning it now is used as emphasis or to express strong feeling. The articles quite negative to language change. We can see this is in the title in the words 'broken the English language.' It straight away makes the reader think that we have have made the English language worse.

In the second article they discuss emoji us in our modern language. They say that the emoji relates to the use of drawings used as a messages in caveman days. The article talks about parents/adults being left behind with language however it does  to say that this is a negative thing. This article opens with the  acronym of ICYMI meaning In case you missed it. By using this in the title whilst it may be for comedic affect it may also be because the writer is supportive of the language change.

George Essay

'Young readers should be corrected whenever they make a mistake' 

Reading is a vital quality children need to learn. Without learning to read as a child they will be restricted for their whole life. We need reading everyday of our lives, whether that is in school or when we leave and go into work or even when we are learning other things like driving we need to be able to read directions and signs.

In the transcript between George ad his Mother George makes quite a few mistakes whilst reading and his Mother uses multiple different techniques to help him not just correcting. One technique she uses is positive reinforcement. Examples of this are when George corrects himself from saying 'we never' we need'. Once he has corrected himself his mother says 'that's it'. Another example is when she helps him sound out sand bags and once he gets it right she says 'well done' and when he struggles with it again she breaks down the compound word and when he gets it right she says 'good boy'. This technique works with Georges reading because later on in the transcript he reads the word sandbags without having to sound it out at all. This relates to Skinner's theory. Skinner believes that children learn through three different techniques, Positive reinforcement,  negative reinforcement and punishment. He does not believe that children should be just corrected when they make a miscue but they should be praised when they get it right.

There is hardly any incidents where George's mother just corrects him. The only time she does within the transcript is toward the end when George says 'the floods made' and his mother interrupts him to correct him by saying 'may'. She may have done this so that George would not loose his flow of reading and be able to just carry on without spending his time correcting himself. To an extent this does work as he straight away continues to read and corrects himself by starting off with saying 'may'. He has understood what she meant. However this does not mean that he will remember this in the future as it has not been solidified in his mind as he is juts repeating what she has said but might not be taking it in.

Bruner believes in the interactionist approach. He believes that children learn from their parents interacting with them. We can see this in the George transcript when his Mother asks him questions about what he is reading. Examples of this are the Mother asking 'whats happening(.) what do you think's happening.' and 'what are they doing with the sandbags' This is helpful in Georges learning because he then has to recount what he has been reading about and remember the words he has already read. We can see this is helpful as George explains the story to his mother but also asks questions such as 'but he isn't letting them get inside is he' he is interacting with his mother and learning more about what is happening in the story. This means that George understands the words that he is reading. This therefore supports Bruners view that children need interaction not just correcting.

Overall it seems children need more than just corrections. They learn from interacting with their parents and being reinforced with what they are saying whether that is praise or negative reinforcement. By just correcting a child you are not building up their memory or their confidence.

Investigation

Do male presenters change their speech when talking to people of different genders?

• Compare a podcast of a male interviewing a female to another podcast of the same presenter speaking to a male.
• Compare my rsults to  Tannens theory.
• Collecting data on what language features they use with each gender
• Do they change to advice vs understanding etc.
• (For evaluation) Podcast may not be completely reliable because they're aware of recording and questions are planned before hand so not completely natural.

Child language podcast

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07wsmrp

• Children tend to get words wrong when they are learning a language that are domestic words because they're local terms e.g foods, names etc.
• When a child gets a word incorrect it is often easy for the adult to understand what they mean because its so similar to the actual word e.g jumpolines instead of trampolines.
• When we hear word we connect it to words that start with the same sounds e.g log and locks. If we hear the word logs and there is different pictures in front of us, sometimes we look at the picture of keys over logs because keys associate with the word 'lock'.