Should you be learning American or British English? Find out in this episode of the Business English Community Podcast: Here is the full transcript: Should you learn American or British English? Hi, there, I’m Paul Urwin and welcome to the Business English Community podcast, where the world of business meets the English language. We discuss culture, strategies, techniques, vocabulary, grammar, and much, much more. Find out more at BusinessEnglishCommunity.com. Hi, there, Paul here, and welcome to episode 14 of the Business English Community podcast. I hope you’re doing fantastically well, and in today’s episode I’m going to be talking about American and British and American or British English. Which one should you be learning? Well, first of all, a quick reminder that there is a completely free, completely free, training, on the website. If you haven’t downloaded it already, I really suggest that you go and check it out. It’s at www.BusinessEnglishCommunity.com. In fact, there is a whole bunch of great stuff on the website. So, when you’re not listening to the podcast, well worth checking it out. Okay, well, for today’s topic I wanted to talk about American and British English, because this is a question that I really get quite a lot. Which one should I learn? Should I be learning American English, or should I be learning British English? Well, first of all, what’s the difference anyway? What is the difference between these two versions of English? I think the first thing that I would say is, that seems to be quite surprising to a number of people, is that the difference is actually not that great. We are not talking about two different languages at all. We are talking about the same English language, that has a few differences. There are some differences in spelling. For example, in American English, the word color is spelled C-O-L-O-R, C-O-L-O-R, whereas in British English it would be C-O-L-O-U-R, C-O-L-O-U-R. So, that spelling, that small spelling difference happens with words such as color, flavor, and a number of others. And there are also some differences in vocabulary. For example, in American English you would normally refer to going “on vacation.” “I’m going to go on vacation.” Whereas, in British English you would say “on holiday.” “Where are you going on holiday next year?” “Where are you going on holiday next year?” So, some small vocabulary differences, as well. And also, some differences in sentence structure. For example, in British English, we tend to use a lot of tag questions. “You are going to help out at the conference, aren’t you?” “You have seen the report, haven’t you?” “You have seen the report, haven’t you?” So, in British English, the use of tag questions tends to be a little bit greater. And, there are some other differences, but in general, we are talking about the same language. The differences are not quite as great as you might imagine when you read things online that talk about American and British English. Well, as you can probably tell from my accent, or for those of you who know me already, I am of course from England. I am of course from the UK. And therefore, you might expect me to suggest that you should learn British English. Well, I’m not going to do that at all. And, I’m not going to suggest that you learn American English, either. So, what am I going to suggest? Well, let’s go through a few facts and a few numbers before we get into my recommendation. American English is the most spoken form of English, just in terms of numbers. There are many more American English speakers than British English speakers. Britain, or Great Britain, is of course a relatively small island on global terms with some 50 million or 60 million speakers of English. The population of the United States is much greater, closer to 300 million, many of