1.Accent

It’s difficult to make clear distinctions between US and UK accents when there is such a wide variety of accents within both the US and UK. A Texan and a New Yorker are both Americans, but have very different accents. The same goes for British accents in London, Manchester and Glasgow.

 However, some very general distinctions can be made. Americans usually pronounce every “r” in a word, while the British tend to only pronounce the “r” when it’s the first letter of a word.

下面来看一下更加具象化的二者差异：

2.Spelling

3.Vocabulary

4.Grammar

 Prepositions

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.

In the UK, “gotten” as the past participle of “get” is considered archaic and was abandoned long ago in favor of “got” .However, in the US people still use “gotten” as the past participle.

In British English, a collective noun (like committee, government, team, etc.) can be either singular or plural, but more often tends toward plural, emphasizing the members of the group. Collective nouns in the US, by comparison, are always singular, emphasizing the group as one whole entity.

This is a subtle difference that can be easily overlooked in speech, but is much more apparent in written form. Many verbs that are irregular in the preterite in Britain (leapt, dreamt, burnt, learnt) have been made regular in America (leaped, dreamed, burned, learned).

作为全球最常讲的第二语言，英语应该是一个很灵活的语言。毕竟，它不仅仅是在只在美国和英国两个国家使用的。所以，不论你使用的是美式英语还是英式英语，都不会妨碍你跟其他人进行交流。

（编辑：何莹莹）