dialects - How to compare frequency of word use over time between British and American English?


Google Ngram viewer allows one to compare the frequencies of a set of phrases over time. It even allows you to restrict that comparison to an American corpus, or separately to an English one.


What I am wondering if there is any way to compare the frequency of one word/phrase over time between American and English? Either through Google Ngram or something else. I couldn't really find anything on google (itself or by using it).



Answer



On Google's Ngram viewer you can set the corpus to be American English or British English, and get a graph for each. You can then compare the y-axis values, being careful to note that Google autoscales it.


For example: American English and British English.


You can also download the datasets of each corpus if you'd like to do your own data processing.


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