2765: British Got vs American Gotten Jul 16, 2024

In British English, the verb conjugation of ‘get’ traditionally follows get→got→got, without distinguishing between the past tense and the past participle, whereas American English uses get→got→gotten. Interestingly, this American usage actually represents the older form, which now only exists standardly in some regional northern dialects of England, though it also appears in words like ‘begotten’ or phrases such as ‘ill-begotten’, which are less common anyway. In recent decades, more British English speakers have begun to use the participial form ‘gotten’, or at least would not flag it as an error, whereas older generations might. This is a relatively minor change but one of many small adjustments influenced by the dominance of American English in entertainment and other media, although in practice it represents a return to the original conjugational paradigm.