A Corpus of American and British English: A Case Study of Slang

This article is set against the background of linguistic Globalisation and its diffusion through the media. The mass media allow for linguistic shifts taking place in American English to spread to other World Englishes, as a result of an increasing trend towards colloquialisation, Americanisation and a more democratic model of (power) relationships. The present paper focuses on a corpus-based study that analyses the frequency of use of a series of American slang expressions. The study takes as a basis chiefly audiovisual corpora in parallel to which real linguistic data (drawn from a survey on slang) are examined. Results provide evidence of the so called Americanisation of other World Englishes, among them, British English, and that this influence can be observed in both written and audiovisual corpora