British English & North American English: Pronunciation & Accent Differences

Hi and welcome back to engVid today we have a special treat for you this is like an amazing video because we are joined by Emma hello everyone Emma as you probably know is one of the most popular teachers on engVid and we're very lucky to have her here and we're going to be discussing the differences some of the differences between the American and the British sound and I should just make a quick correction we're going to be talking about the North American sound so we're this includes Canadian English and American English so there are many differences between the British accent and the American or Canadian accent let's start by talking about one of the biggest differences which is the pronunciation of r in American and Canadian English we have a very strong r sound so what we're going to do is we're going to actually hear the difference between how i pronounce a list of r sounds and how benjamin pronounces the list of r sounds okay so let's get started father father sister sister bar work work so you might have noticed that my r sounds are a lot stronger and they sound more like er whereas like you're kind of rolling the r exactly whereas your sounds a lot softer and a bit quieter less strong sure um that said there are accents in the UK where the r sound would be strong for example the um anywhere in the west of the UK so the west country um more sort of pirate culture I suppose has that r sound oh okay um so we're now going to have a go at doing one another's accent just for a couple of these words so which word should I try and do in a North American accent Emma hmm let's try car car that was actually really good okay so I'm terrible with British accents but I'm going to now try to pronounce this in a British way so at the moment with that vowel sound where you're almost sort of changing it into a diphthong where you're making two separate vowel sounds whereas actually in a sort of modern day British accent it would just be the single vowel sound of ah ah yeah car car car car yeah with kind of imagine it like a k r car okay so we have talked about the American and Canadian r if you're interested in learning how to produce this sound I actually have a video on the pronunciation of r now what we're going to talk about is another big difference between the British accent and the North American accent and that has to do with what I call the middle t sometimes in North American English we pronounce t's like d's this happens when the t is in the middle of a word so for example I would pronounce this as city so I would not say si ti I'd pronounce this t like a d city how would you pronounce this city so notice he is using more of a t sound while I'm using more of a d sound again I would pronounce this like a d party party okay water water see that's a very big difference I think in our accents with this specific word water and water what water sorry um for numbers we do this a lot in North American English so I'd say 30 40 50 60 and how would you say them 30 40 50 60. so again notice he's pronouncing a lot more of the t sound so here is a sentence that has a lot of t's I'm going to say this in the North American way and then you will say this in your accent in the British way so again listen to the ts and how i pronounce them like d's betty bought a bit of better butter uh betty bought a bit of better butter okay so notice there is a very big difference between our accents um for this sentence um I just want to point out that Emma that i don't feel representative of a British accent that the British accent is really really diverse and it's very difficult to sort of pin it down so I would be um people would classify my voice as being an rp accent um which is basically a region neutral accent generally down in the south of england um that is to do with sort of social classes as well um but yeah I'm sure if there were kind of English natives watching this they'd be like that's not my accent so yeah just wanted to point that out and I should also clarify that although I'm talking about North American English and pronunciation i also might pronounce things more in a Canadian way but again there's many different accents in Canada and in the united states and there's a lot of shared similarities so in this video we're talking about some of the more common features that are different between um North American and British accent but again there are many accents within each group yeah and actually uh Gill has made a video on the different accents in the UK so if you do want to find out more about it that would be a good video to look at so we've covered the strong r and we've covered the middle t if you're interested in learning more about the pronunciation of the middle t sound in North American English i actually have a video on that so you can learn how to produce it but now we are going to look at stress in words there is sometimes a difference in where we place stress in words in British English versus North American English again stress refers to when we say a part of the word louder and longer so we are going to say these different words and I want you to listen carefully to where we are putting the stretch okay so let's start with the first word vitamin how would you say this i would use to do this vowel a bit differently I would say vitamin vitamin yeah so I say vitamin and I'm vitamin vitamin the next word is advertisement um advertisement advertisement yeah I mean often we'll shorten it just to advert um so how do you say advert we say ads so we shorten it even more yeah but with the word advert yeah advert so I think that's similar but advert you be the judge okay you can see on this one that we got very confused about how to spell it because it's spelt differently in North america to um the UK so when Emma wrote this I was like no no there's an I we had an argument about spelling and um we had to write both so the answer is that in um North america it's about just with a no I here but in the rest of the world the rest of the English speaking world uh we have this eye here and if you're wondering what this means it's a type of element or metal uh we often talk about aluminum foil so it's just I guess an element on the periodic table is that or aluminium foil whoa so let's hear that difference in pronunciation again how would you say this aluminium I would say aluminum aluminum and he's saying aluminium aluminium so again this is very different the next word I think there is a difference in the vowel sound here so I would say zebra whereas i would say zebra zebra zebra okay so again a difference i hear British people use this word a lot and it always sounds very different to my ears when I hear it I would say garage there are two ways of pronouncing it in uh British English garage or garage okay so garage okay so again different ways to pronounce this and a bit different uh the next word princess princess whereas well just to make a comment on on the sound of the American um like often it goes in terms of like pitch the pitch goes down so Emma just said princess like it kind of went down um so if you're trying to replicate the American accent think of going down the stairs i like that um I like that visual too of going down the stairs so how would you say this word princess okay and it's it's a bit of a can be a bit of a derogatory term like if you call someone a bit of a princess then you're saying come on you're being a bit a bit pathetic and we we have the same meaning actually where it can be an insult to here what about this last one i would say vaccine uh we would have less stress on the end here so just be vaccine it's kind of almost like you're swallowing that sound at the end vaccine okay okay so some of these words are very different some of them are a little bit more similar like I think vaccine there's less of a difference but still a small one yeah compared to like aluminum yeah aluminium all right so now benjamin is going to tell us some of the differences he has noticed um okay I'm just going to scrub this off so we've started to see some of the very basic differences between a standard American accent and a loosely British accent and as Emma has pointed out she's got a couple of videos on the topic and I also have a lesson on rp if people want to understand more about what that is what I'm looking at here is some of the differences between the accents in the UK um are you which accents are you aware of Emma I've said I've heard of the cockney accent okay um where's that from London yeah oh good okay um and I've also heard of I think a south English accent that's more posh is my understanding and I've also heard that the North accent is less posh but this is what I've heard yeah yeah well yeah it's um it's a generalization but in the way it sounds I mean in the south of the UK there are accents as well so you've got the West Country where we you know drink cider and play a bit of cricket on the wicket in the village and all that and um you know the more sort of cockney accent so this demonstrates a cockney accent here quite well because in uh RP uh the sort of formal version of English it's you have all the h's and it's like harry harry is huge but if you're in a London cab and you're speaking to a local he'd be like arie aaron he's huge that one in me so inny he goes to e and inny um can you try and give me a cockney accent ariary ariery harry arie airy airy meaning yet hair air airy airy airy airy arry yeah boy he's huge isn't he um okay so these are some features of the um RP accent we have our h's a very clipped precise tone so whereas in uh sort of more like urban English where um it's almost it's kind of considered uncool if you pronounce all the consonants and people are trying to like sort of fit in and they don't want their voice to to stand out they'll be like I haven't got much freight I haven't got very much time for you today for you today I haven't or even like more slang i ain't got much time for you today i ain't got much time here today so haven't could be replaced by with ain't um but if we're trying to pronounce that absolutely correctly it would be like all the vocal energy is here in the mouth I haven't got very much time for you today okay give it a go I uh can you say it one more time and then I'll say it I haven't got very much time for you today i haven't got very much time for you today pretty good today today yeah okay cool that was good oh oh thank you um so the vowel sound typically we will have a uh like kind of an r r which is quite identifiably um RP so for example people disagree about how the greatest music festival is pronounced Emma you would say Glastonbury yes I think most people of my generation in the UK would say it like that as well but some of the older generation of RP speakers would say Glastonbury glossed and berry brie brie oh so this isn't berry it's brie yeah glossed in free yeah um which always sounds really weird to me um so just practicing some of those um that sound so if you repeat after me Emma so rather rather yep craft craft how would you say this city in the southwest do you want the North American or how I think you would say it yeah bath I love it when she does her interaction which cracks me up um smart smart okay so really to make this RP sound in in a nutshell you're using your vocal um muscles around the lips you're thinking forward the sound uh pronouncing everything very um correctly where there's a t you're making those t sounds you're keeping those h's in and you're making this r sound okay so it's an r sound so now to demonstrate um the differences between the American and the British sound we're going to read a piece of text so you can really start to notice it and Emma has chosen this text very carefully because it actually incorporates most of the different consonants and vowel sounds correct okay so we have here a part of the grandfather passage what we are going to do if it's okay with you is I'm going to say a sentence from this and then you can say a sentence and we're going to compare our accents what I want you to really focus on is how we pronounce our r's remember the strong r versus more of the soft r listen to how we pronounce our vowels maybe this the stress in some of the words we use as well as our teas okay is there anything you want the audience to pay attention to uh let's see it in action okay you wish to know all about my grandfather you wish to know all about my grandfather okay so this it was for me this was less about the the actual sounds it was more about the kind of the sing-song nature of uh you know the different melody of of them could you read it one more time please Emma sure you wish to know all about my grandfather okay you wish to know all about my grandfather she says you wish to know all about my grandfather so I would say that if you're looking at the sort of the rise and fall the melody here but probably the British one was a little bit flatter whereas there was a bit more um of the sing-song nature to your uh rendition yeah I would agree with that and I would also say one other thing um the way we said grandfather is also different again that is the strong r I'm saying er grandfather whereas yours was a bit more subtle and a bit of a softer art yeah just sort of drops off in the British English um great next sentence well he is nearly 93 years old yet he still thinks as swiftly as ever okay so again we've got that r sound at the end quite a long sentence this one could you say it one more time for me sure well he is nearly 93 years old yet he still thinks as swiftly as ever so this word is going to be different in British to American Emma says it as 93. and I for me it'd be 93. so again that's that t sound I'm saying it like a d 90 whereas you're saying it like a 70 yeah okay I'll read it all the entire sentence well he is nearly 93 years old yet he still thinks as swiftly as ever i also noticed a difference on the way we said ever again that's that r sound so I'm saying ever whereas you're saying ever ever so less of that r okay let's keep finding out about grandfather okay he dresses himself in an old black frock coat sorry let me say that again he dresses himself in an old black frock coat usually several buttons missing now this vowel sound is quite different um Emma says frock and I would say frock one more time frock frock okay I'll read the whole sentence he dresses himself in an old black frock coat usually several buttons missing now if you remember what I was saying about trying to speak in clipped tones then we have a good opportunity to do to do it with words like buttons it's quite satisfying noise buttons okay and that would be a bit different for me because I would say buttons or I guess it is kind of similar buttons buttons yeah okay so maybe similar with this word what about coat coat okay I'm just wondering if there's a bit of a difference in the vowel there um it's a sort of different shape in the mouth I find that um well actually especially with you guys in in Canada there's a difference between American English and Canadian English where the u sound is much more prominent in Canadian how do you say about a boot no no no no no sorry so that is a Canadian stereotype we don't say a boot but we do have a different way to say about so there's more of a rounding there I say about which is different from my American friends and my British friends how would you say about about oh cow out about about yeah whereas it's more kind of two different uh vowel sounds a diphthong a a boat a bait about about you got that one yes have a little practice um well Emma it's been a real um joy to have you um here sharing your your thoughts about the um transatlantic differences in in our um accents um and you know Emma has a fantastic channel where there are tons and tons of really useful videos there to help you guys with your English so do head over there and subscribe to her channel i hope you have got lots out of this video entertainment if nothing else and do give the quiz a go now just to try and remember some of the things we have said if you're not a subscriber of mine you can do that be my guest and get the notifications with that bell shape and we'll see you very soon there's going to be a video on Emma's channel where I am speaking with her about some of the more cultural differences between North American life and British life.

Channel: Benjamin’s English · Learn English with engVid

Views: 101,424

Rating: 4.950963 out of 5

Keywords: accent, North American, Canadian, America, US, UK, British accent, British English, pronunciation, spoken english, speaking skills, learn English, English, native speaker, ESL, English grammar, vocabulary, English vocabulary, engVid, speak English, lessons, IELTS, TOEFL, TOEIC, anglais, inglese, inglés, Englisch, англи́йский, angielski, engleză, anglicky, αγγλικά, İngilizce, إنجليزي, Inggris, Angol, EnglishTeacherEmma, TESOL, TESL, TEFL, presentation skills, English Jade, Lucy, English Benjamin

Id: yxC44ISaBNM

Length: 22min 36sec (1356 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 16 2020