1.1 Overview of British and American English                                    

The accent, which enjoys the highest overt prestige in England,  is known to phoneticians as Received Pronunciation (RP).  Geographically, RP is associated with England, though not with any particular within England. It is the most general type of educated British pronunciation (although there are many highly educated English people who do not use it).  Socially it is characteristic of the upper and upper middle class, insofar as members of the latter class, sociologically defined, speak with an accent not localizable within England. In general, we use British English Accent instead of RP.

In the United States there is no accent whose status and role correspond to that of RP in England. General American is a term that has been applied to the two-thirds of the American population who do not have a recognizably local accent in the sense just mentioned.  There is certainly some variability within the General American accent group. Table 1 2 illustrate the broad classes of American and British and American  phoneme Classes.

Table 1: Broad class of American  Phoneme Classes

Table 2: Broad class of  British Phoneme Classes

Main difference between British and American are described below. Corresponding examples are listed in Table 3.

• Almost all the words that have /i:/ in British have the corresponding /i/ in American and vise versa.

• A notable difference in realization of the liquid /l/ between British and American is that American speakers prefer to use more velarized (darker) /ł/ than British speakers, particularly in intervocalic position.

• American usually use a voice tap /ſ/ to realize /t/ in intervocalic position, while British remains /t/ as voiceless in all environment.
• A phenomenon known as pre-/r/ schwa deletion is often demonstrated by American speakers, e.g. in the words mirror and near where the final /Ir/ is commonly reduced to just /r/.
• In American, there is still a remaining possibility of the cluster /hw/ while in British, it only survives as artificial pronunciations, the usual form in plain /w/.
• American also drops /j/ in various contexts, which is known as later yod dropping [4].

Table 3: Phonetic Comparison of American and British Accents

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