Lithuanian English Variety Preferences in Writing: British or American

Abstract

English Foreign Language teaching in Lithuania has traditionally been conducted in British English, with teachers preferring the British variety over the American one (Bulajeva & Hogan‐Brun 2010). However, with the continued dominance of American media particularly in films (Crane 2013), Lithuanians are ever more exposed to the American variety. Bikeline (2015) has conducted research on the written English variety preference of Lithuanian students. However, she has limited her research to academic English by studying academic papers submitted by students, where the influence of teachers is present and neglects the use of English outside the academic sphere. As such, this study aims to determine the primary variety of English used by Lithuanians on social media. The present study also looks into how extensive influence in a field such as fashion and computing may result in preferences to use the variety with greater influence in the field. Social media was chosen because the wealth of data is readily available online. Corpora will be created from these social media websites and quantitative analysis would be conducted using statistical modelling of words with systemic differences in spelling or differences in word choice in British and American English using Oxford English Dictionary (British) and Merriam-Webster (American) dictionaries. The results provide insight into the preferences of Lithuanians on social media and areas where one variety has greater usage than the other.