Originally Posted by
Pie_Scribe
The problem with any kind of analysis of English and its usage is that the language has so many different variations, far beyond simply British and American. Within England alone there are numerous different dialects, and if you throw in accents as well, it presents a huge amount of variation. The language started out as a hybrid anyway, and by Shakespeare's day it had already got a blend of old Germanic, Norman French, Latin, Celtic and Old Norse. In the years since, it's only had more thrown in the blender. Also, there is no standard form of English, so you can't even give a definite definition of what actually IS British English, because people from different areas will all have different ideas of the correct structure and words to use in a sentence.