Awareness of Grammatical Differences between British and American English among Young Swedes 

Abstract: Background and aim: According to the most recent curriculum for the Swedish upper secondary school1, the students should be able to differentiate between British and American English. Furthermore, they should be able to keep to one of the varieties, as this is a prerequisite of writing correct texts in English. In the present thesis, young Swedes’ awareness of grammatical differences between British and American standard English and which variety they use are investigated. The investigation is conducted by means of a questionnaire. The questionnaire was composed of three parts. The first part consisted of sentences written in English that the informants had to judge as written prevailingly in British or American English. In the second part, the informants had to translate sentences from Swedish to English, and then judge them as British or American. The third part of the questionnaire comprised questions concerned with language use and attitude, as well as questions on basic information such as the informants’ age, education and mother tongue. Results and conclusions: Nine informants fulfilled the inclusion criteria. The informants’ judgments of the sentences in English suggest that they are not entirely able to differentiate between British and American English. Moreover, their translations of the Swedish sentences indicate that the informants mix British and American English. Furthermore, they are not aware of which variety they use and the majority does not know whether they prefer British or American English. In addition, the findings could support the emergence of Euro-English, a Mid-Atlantic variety.