British people love to bash American English. Many people grimace at an Americanism infiltrating a British English sentence. But when you set aside a few linguistic differences: chips for crisps, elevator for lift, it is remarkable how similar the two versions of English remain.

The grammars are almost identical. One of the few differences is the American “gotten”, but even that turns out to be only half a difference. Americans use it only when they mean “acquired” – “we’ve gotten a new car” – and use the same form as the British when they mean “possess” or “obliged to” – “I’ve got a pen” or “I’ve got to write a letter”.

This may not seem an incredible feat but one must remember that ‘the first permanent settlement in Jamestown, Virginia, was in 1607, when Shakespeare was still alive’. Anyone that has read Shakespeare is aware of how different modern English is to the English of Shakespeare’s time. That both British and American English have evolved and changed into languages that are essentially the same is quite unusual. For example ‘the 17th century Dutch settlers in South Africa ended up speaking Afrikaans, a substantially different language’.

So, instead of focusing on the differences of spelling and words, why not focus on the remarkable similarities between two versions of English that could be unrecognisable to each other.

via: The Financial Times