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