Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales wrote:
Domas Mituzas wrote:
Do you imagine how all that en-gb/en-us stuff appears from international point of view?
I wonder about it, yes. My own perspective is that en-gb is more international, save for local British slang, and that en-us is peculiar to the US, save for American slang being known everywhere due to our movies.
Well, it really seems to be regional, and is likely to fluctuate a lot in the near future. I'm unable to find any good censuses (do such things even exist?), but from my admittedly limited experience, it seems en-us is more common as a second language in Asia than en-gb is, partly due to the influence of US media, and partly due to the fact that there are more Americans travelling there on 1-2-year assignments to teach English-language classes than there are people from en-gb countries.
However, there doesn't really seem to be a lot of difference between the two dialects in international usage, beyond some trivial spelling issues (colour/color and sabre/saber). The real dialect part of the language is almost always local---whether they spell things "colour" or "color", the en-gb and en-us English-speakers in Greece, for example, write more like each other than they write like either UKians or USians.
And FWIW, I agree it's not really worth the effort. Anything that's not mutually intelligible isn't generally used in international English anyway.
-Mark