Englishes

David Lavery, an important American scholar in Television Studies, editor of volumes on The X Files, Seinfeld, Twin Peaks, Deadwood, The Sopranos, and others, father of Buffy Studies, is now Chair of Film and Television at Brunel University, London. He's been commenting on the differences between American English and British English on his blog. Two examples:
(1) I just finished serving as the external examiner on a PhD thesis at Brunel University, and reading through the candidate's three hundred+ pages on Doctor Who fandom, I was struck by the author's frequent (and not uncommon) use of the word "whilst." The forty undergraduate essays I just slogged through also showed the word in common usage.
In the room in which I teach, a message on the remote control keypad tells me to wait "whilst the projector warms up."
Not surprisingly, the American Heritage Dictionary notes that this archaic word is "mostly British" in usage. Use of "whilst" in the US would produce, I think, snickering if not outright laughter.
It is impossible to conceive of an American using this in conversation or in print. If he did, he would have no friends. To my ear it sounds pretentious--sounds like something a Pythonesque contestant in an "Upper Class Twit of the Year" contest might utter.
It is snowing today in London. As soon as the sun comes up I intend to go out amongst my fellow Londoners.
(2) On British television a week ago an advert for the Korean car manufacturer caught my attention because the very British announcer pronounced the name "High-an-die." It made me wonder if I had been pronouncing the name wrong all these years.
But watching Fox News (trying to keep up-to-speed on what the enemy thinks) on my newly installed SKY satellite television I heard an American Hyundai commercial. "Hun-die" the voice-over intoned, the pronunciation with which I was familiar.
"Two countries separated by a common language" (George Bernard Shaw)--a paradox I thought I understood. But "two countries separated by different pronunciations of a third language"--that will need further explanation.
The relation between British and American English is similar to the one between Portuguese Portuguese (?) and Brazilian Portuguese. The firsts have archaic traces and the seconds are simpler and more creative. But it's somehow misleading to talk of British English and Portuguese Portuguese forgetting regional differences. There are regions in Portugal where the spoken Portuguese is difficult to understand even for native speakers — the Azores and Madeira archipelagos, for instance.
Sometimes it doesn't come naturally for me to speak with a british accent — even though I pronounce "duty" as "dyuty" instead of "doody", "militry" instead "military" is a bit of a stretch. I've basically learned English by reading and listening American English. But I'm becoming accustomed to use certain words. Not "whilst" instead of "while" — I've noticed that too! —, but, for example, in the recent paper that presented at the conference on Battlestar Galactica, I automatically wrote "lounger" instead of "chaise longue" and "trousers" instead of "pants".