American and British English pronunciation differences

Differences in pronunciation between American English (AmE) and British English (BrE) can be divided into:

• differences in accent (i.e. phoneme inventory and realisation). See differences between General American and Received Pronunciation for the standard accents in the United States and Britain; for information about other accents see regional accents of English speakers.
• differences in the pronunciation of individual words in the lexicon (i.e. phoneme distribution). In this article, transcriptions use Received Pronunciation (RP) to represent BrE and General American (GAm) and to represent AmE.

In the following discussion

• superscript ^A2 after a word indicates the BrE pronunciation of the word is a common variant in AmE
• superscript ^B2 after a word indicates the AmE pronunciation of the word is a common variant in BrE

Stress

French stress

For many loanwords from French where AmE has final-syllable stress, BrE stresses an earlier syllable. Such words include:

• BrE first-syllable stress: adult^A2,B2, ballet^A2, baton, beret, bidet, blasé, brevet^A2, brochure^B2, buffet, café^A2, canard^B2, chagrin, chalet^A2, chauffeur^A2,B2, chiffon, cliché^B2, coupé, croissant, debris^B2, debut, décor,...... ...
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