Board Thread:Fun and Games/@comment-35491013-20190123214056/@comment-36426936-20190201005757

Okay. So in a nutshell, British English and American English are not only two different accents, but two different dialects. Dialects are not only distinguished by pronunciation, but also by vocab and spelling. Basically, after the colonists from England settled in the Eastern Coast of what's now the U.S., their dialects changed because of isolation, having little influence on each other and with few residents visiting each other. So in terms of vocab, American English changed from British English because the colonists encountered stuff in America that weren't in England. The spelling changed because of nationalism for the U.S. as an independent identity. Their accents changed because their communication was mainly limited to writing and in non-verbal ways, because of the distance between each other.