American English and British English: Vocabulary and Grammar Differences

American English and British English are the famous English varieties in the world, although there are lots of varieties in English, but AmE and BrE are the most famous, they have lots of differences each other and sometimes those differences make the new learner confused. This research examines about Grammar and Vocabulary differences between American and British English. The researcher uses Qualitative Approach in this research because the researcher explains the results of research in words form, while Library Research is type of research that researcher used, because the sources of this research are several books, articles and others. The findings of this research indicated that are many differences between American English and British English including in the aspects and grammar and vocabulary. The differences are not a big deal for native speakers, but they may confuse non-native speakers of English.


INTRODUCTION
As speakers of language, we all have certain deep-seated notions concerning the nature of language. Like all such fundamental beliefs, these are often wrong, though they may contain a germ of truth. For example, as literate beings, we tend to equate language with writing. But there are significant differences, not only between oral sounds and written symbols, but also between spoken and written syntax or vocabulary (Laurel and Donna, 2010).
In numbers of speakers as well as in its uses for international communication and in other less quantifiable measures, English is on the most important languages of the world. Spoken by more than 380 million people in the United Kingdom, the United States, and the former British Empire, it is the largest of the Western languages. English, however, is not the most widely used native language in the world. Chinese, in its eight spoken varieties, is known to 1.3 billion people in China alone. Some of the European languages are comparable to English in reflecting the forces of history, especially regarding European expansion since the sixteenth century. Spanish, next in size to English, is spoken by about 330 million people, Portuguese by 180 million, Russian by 175 million, Germany by 110 million, French by 80 million native speakers (and a large number of second-language speakers), Italian by 65 million (Albert C. Baugh & Thomas Cable, 2002) Although English is important for international language, most non-native speakers of English find it difficult in learning English, and on the other hand some of them may confuse because English has many varieties such as American English (AmE), British English (BrE), Australian English. the big differences are about English America and English Britain in which they have some differences about vocabulary, grammar also pronunciation. A beginner will shock if they think so much about these differences.
The question is, why English has many varieties?
Here is the answer, (David Crystal, 2003) explained that the historical account traces the movement of English around the world, beginning with the pioneering voyages to the Americas, Asia, and the Antipodes. It was an expansion which continued with the nineteenth-century colonial developments in Africa and South Pacific, and which took a significant further step when it was adopted in the mid twentieth century as an official or semi-official language by many newly independent states. English is now represented in very continent, and in island of three major oceans -Atlantic (St. Helena), Indian (Seychelles) and Pacific (in many islands, such as Fiji and Hawaii). It is this spread of representation which makes the application of the label 'global language' a reality.
Most of topics that always discussed in the English lesson are about the differences between AmE and BrE, (John Algeo, 2006) said that the most obvious difference between BrE and AmE is in the "tune" of the language, that is, the intonation that accompanies sentences. When a Briton or an American talks, he identifies himself primarily by the tunes of his respective varieties, pronunciation and grammar.
English has many contents inside such as grammar, vocabulary, pronunciation, and etc. Grammar is a set of rules of language that arrange the order of it than it will be a perfect sentence, as said by Richard and Schmidt that grammar is a description of the structure of language and how language units such as words and phrases are formed into sentences (Richard and Schmidt in Muh. Saeful Effendi, at al., 2017). The next definition, grammar is a set of rules or principles of the working of a language, its system structure (Brinton in Muh. Saeful Effendi, at al., 2017). Then the definition of vocabulary is little bit complicated because it has many definitions, however little bit complicated (Schmitt in Iman Alizadeh, 2016) argued that vocabulary as the knowledge of words and word meanings. Or someone else may define vocabulary as a list of words arranged in alphabetical order with their definitions. A word, in most linguistic analyses, is described as a set of properties, or features, each word is the combination of its meaning, register, association, collocation grammatical behavior, written form(spelling), spoken form (pronunciation) and frequency. And we can find lots of definitions about the other subjects on many books or articles.
In accordance with the statements above we know that the spread of English was so wide and English also has many differences. the researcher therefore will focus about two differences between AmE and BrE, and the researcher will focus on two types of differences those are vocabulary and grammar between AmE and BrE. When the people who start to learn English, they will need some vocabularies and they will need some literatures such as grammar to mastery the English. The purpose of this study is to support previous study about several differences between AmE and BrE and why it happened.

METHODS
In this research the researcher used Qualitative Approach because the researcher wanted to explain the results in words form, therefore the researcher used this approach based on Sugiyono's opinion (2016, 11) that qualitative research aims to construct and to interpret then will explain the issues that studied.
While Library Research is the type of research that researcher used because the sources of this research are to study about several book, articles and others to get the conclusion what this research means, then the researcher explained this research descriptively with deductive and inductive analyses that Library Research use frequently and search the cause of problem of this research. This is in accordance with (Moh. Kasiram, 2010) that Library Research must be comprehensive; it means that could observe all of the problem research, so it could support the discussion and solve the problem clearly.

RESULTS AND DISCUSSION Grammar Differences
1. Past and Past Participle Forms of Verb Differences in verb forms are acknowledge as perhaps the most significant dissimilarity between BrE and AmE. A number of BrE verbs have a t-inflection while AmE verbs tend to conform to the standardized -ed structure. These differences constitute a subtle distinction in pronunciation which on ten goes unnoticed (in pronunciation), but indicate in which English a text is written. It is worth mentioning that many AmE conjugations are considered standard in BrE, thus both versions are accepted as correct (Modiano in Md. Faruquzzaman, 2017). Though the irregular past form such as dreamt, spelt etc are possible in Amereican English, they are less common than the forms ending in -ed. Here is the diagram for verbs showing different simple past and past participle forms in BrE and AmE. In the other hand (Bin Zhang, 2008) wrote on his article that in British English, the adverbs "yet" and "already" cannot be used in past tense and can only be used in past perfect tense. However, in AmE, they can be used both in past tense and pas perfect tense. For example: Dylan Lyons also wrote his article on Babbel Magazine that Americans tend to use the past simple tense when describing something that has currently occurred, while people in the U.K. are more likely to use the present perfect tense. Have you got the newspaper?

Prepositions
Differences between AmE and BrE in prepositions are shown in the following to aspects: (1) different use of prepositions in the construction of phrases; (2) when using phrases, one will use a preposition while the other will omit it (Bin Zhang, 2008 The same statement is declared by (Dylan Lyons, 2020) that the differences below are only a general rule, American speech has influenced Britain via pop culture, and vice versa. Therefore, some prepositional differences are not as pronounced as they once were. Other common collective nouns that often take a plural verb in British English are: army, company, jury, audience, crowd, majority, class, enemy, staff, committee, government and union.

Articles
There is a remarkable difference in the use of articles in BrE and AmE. For example, BrE has both use of 'a' even with words beginning with vowel sounds in informal use such as a orange. Whereas AmE has a striking use of definite articles with some words such as hospital, university etc. e.g.

BrE-He is in hospital. (BrE-a patient)
AmE-He is in the hospital. (BrE-other than a patient) BrE-He is at university. AmE-He is at the university.
(Tottie in Md. Faruquzzaman, 2017) Bin Zhang (2008) said that Most phrases of British English have articles, while those of American English do not have. The "the" in the standard expressions in British "all the afternoon", "all the winter", "all the week", "this time of the year", etc. are usually omitted in AmE. For examples: The swimming pools are open all summer I will be here all afternoon He has gone all week (Bin Zhang, 2008) British English will use articles in front of "sickness" and "river", while AmE does not. For example, British English expresses in the form of "the measles", "the mumps", "the flu", "the Niagara Falls" and "Black Creek", while AmE says "measles", "mumps", "flu", "Niagara Falls" and "Black Creek".
However, there are exceptions. In some expressions, BrE does not use articles, while AmE does.  20 January 1993= 20/1/199314 November 2005= 14-11-2005 Sometimes the last two letters of the number as spoken can be used (th, rd, st, nd):

Today is the 7 th September
The grand opening in on 1 st June. or … on June 1 st .
With the exception of May and June, months can be shortened as follows: Jan , Feb, Mar, Apr, Jul, Aug, Sept, Oct, Nov, Dec. Dates in American English, the month of the date come before the day and year. For example, Independence Day in the USA is on July 4 th each year. In the year 2000 the date was 4/7/2000 in British English. In American English this is written 7/4/2000."

Vocabulary Differences
Lexicon or vocabulary is a central linguistic area where are noticeable differences between BrE and AmE. Milward in Ashraf Abdel (2018) suggests that the three main semantic areas where there are differences between BrE and AmE English are food, clothing and transportation. The vagaries of fashion have caused divergence in the of clothing. The many differences in the terminology of transportation result from the fact that the railroad (British "railway") and motorcar industries, developed after the separation of the United States and Great Britain.
Therefore, the following tables show some examples regarding the differences in vocabulary between BrE and AmE. The first complete America's Dictionary has been accomplished in 1828 by a lawyer and lexicographer named Noah Webster. He argued briefly that English in America is different with English in Britain (Nurhendi, 2016).
The following example are several differences vocabulary between Ame and BrE:

CONCLUSION
Although there are many differences between AmE and BrE in many ways such as grammatical and vocabulary. they are mostly similar each other and they can understand each other in their daily conversation, but the difficulty might appear if the new learners begin learning English. It is common to whoever will start learning English, because the differences are very visible. In addition, the differences between AmE and BrE especially in grammar and vocabulary may become a problem to beginner if they want to take English for academic purposes, because BrE and AmE have a special standardized.