13 Facts About British English

British English is, according to Oxford Dictionaries, "English as used in Great Britain, as distinct from that used elsewhere".

British English is a West Germanic language that originated from the Anglo-Frisian dialects brought to Britain by Germanic settlers from various parts of what is northwest Germany and the northern Netherlands.

The original Old British English language was then influenced by two waves of invasion: the first was by speakers of the Scandinavian branch of the Germanic family, who settled in parts of Britain in the 8th and 9th centuries; the second was the Normans in the 11th century, who spoke Old Norman and ultimately developed an British English variety of this called Anglo-Norman.

The various British English dialects differ in the words that they have borrowed from other languages.

The BBC Voices project collected hundreds of news articles about how the British speak English from swearing through to items on language schools.

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Estuary British English has been gaining prominence in recent decades: it has some features of RP and some of Cockney.

Phonological features characteristic of British English revolve around the pronunciation of the letter R, as well as the dental plosive T and some diphthongs specific to this dialect.

British English dialects differ on the extent of diphthongisation of long vowels, with southern varieties extensively turning them into diphthongs, and with northern dialects normally preserving many of them.

For example, Jane Austen, a British English author, writes in Chapter 4 of Pride and Prejudice, published in 1813:.

The standardisation of British English is thought to be from both dialect levelling and a thought of social superiority.

Samuel Johnson's A Dictionary of the British English Language was a large step in the British English-language spelling reform, where the purification of language focused on standardising both speech and spelling.

The Oxford University Press guidelines were originally drafted as a single broadsheet page by Horace Henry Hart, and were at the time the first guide of their type in British English; they were gradually expanded and eventually published, first as Hart's Rules, and in 2002 as part of The Oxford Manual of Style.

British English is the basis of, and very similar to Commonwealth English, that is English spoken and written in Commonwealth countries, though often with some local variation.