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The 2 major national influences and speakers are those of the United Kingdom and the United States (British and American English).

These languages (British and American English) influence is exerted through films, television, popular music, the Internet and the World Wide Web, air travel
and control, commerce, scientific publications, economic and military assistance, and
activities of the United States in world affairs, even when those activities are unpopular.

British English has long enjoyed greater prestige in Western Europe and other places worldwide. Americans who are put off by “posh accents” may be impressed by them and hence likely to suppose that
standard British English is somehow “better” English than their own variety.

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Conservatism and Innovation in American English

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Conservatism and Innovation in American English

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Most Americans pronounce r where it is spelled because English speakers in the motherland did so at the time of the settlement of America.

During the Revolution American pronunciation has been on the whole independent of the British; the result has been that American pronunciation has not come to share the development undergone later by Standard British.

British.”

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Many American locutions are perfectly well understood and used in Britain.

Package is supposedly American and parcel British, though the supposedly
British word is well known to all Americans.

Stairway is supposedly American and staircase British, although stairs is the usual

term in both countries and stairway is recorded in British dictionaries with no notation that it is confined to American usage.

Window shade is supposedly American and blind British, though blind(s) is the usual term throughout the eastern United States.

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American Infiltration of the British Word Stock

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American Infiltration of the British Word Stock

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In recent years many other Americanisms have been introduced into British usage like cafeteria, cocktail, egghead, electrocute.

The convenient use of noun as verb in to contact, meaning ‘to get in touch with,’ originated in America, though it might just as well have done so in England,
since there is nothing un-English about such a conversion: scores of other nouns
have undergone the same shift of use.

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There are many differences other than differences to in the choice of prepositions:
for instance, the English householder lives in a street, the American on it; the English traveler gets in or out of a train, the American on or off it; but such varia-
tions are of little consequence.

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American attitudes put greater stress on grammatical “correctness,” based on such matters as the supposed “proper” position of only and other shibboleths.

The use of they, them, and their with a singular antecedent has long been standard English; specimens of this “solecism” are found in Jane Austen, Thomas De Quincey, Lord Dunsany, Cardinal Newman, Samuel Butler, and others.

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Since 1800, the dictionary tradition, which had reached an earlier acme in Dr. Samuel Johnson’s work, has progressed far beyond what was possible for that good man. Today English speakers have available an impressive array of dictionaries to suit a variety of needs.

The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) began in 1857 as a project of the Philological Society of London for a “New English
Dictionary”.

What distinguishes the Oxford English Dictionary is not merely its size, but the
the fact that it aims to record every English word, present and past, and to give for
each a full historical treatment, tracing the word from its first appearance until the present day.

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British English has a pronunciation of each of the following words differing from that usual in American English: ate [ɛt], been [bin], evolution [ivǝlušǝn], fragile [fræǰaɪl], medicine [mɛdsɪn], nephew [nɛvyu], process [prosɛs], trait [tre], valet [vælɪt], zenith [zɛnɪθ].

Less noticeable, perhaps because it is more widespread in American English than the use of [ɑ] or [a] in the ask words, is the standard British English loss of [r] except when a vowel follows it.

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Noah Webster, through the influence of his spelling book and dictionaries, was
responsible for Americans settling upon -or spellings for a group of words spelled in
his day with either -or or -our: armo(u)r, behavio(u)r, colo(u)r, favo(u)r, flavo(u)r,
harbo(u)r, labo(u)r, neighbo(u)r, and the like.
Webster is also responsible for the  American practice of using -er instead of there that the British came to favor in a number of words—for instance, calibre, centre, litre, manoeuvre, metre (of poetry or of the unit of length in the metric system),sepulchre, and theatre.

He proposed dropping final k in such words as almanack, musick, physick, publick, and traffick, bringing about a change that occurred independently in British English as well.

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The variations that depend on us have to do with where we learned our English (regional or geographical dialects), what cultural groups we belong to (ethnic or social dialects), and a host of other factors such as our sex, age, and education.

Standard English is the written form
of our language used in books and periodicals and is therefore also called edited English.

The language of African Americans, one of the most prominent ethnic groups in the United States, has been studied especially from the standpoint of its relationship to the standard language.

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Those dialects were affected by historical events, such as the Viking influence in the Northern and East Midland areas and the growth of London as the metropolitan center of England, which brought influences from many dialects together.

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Today English is used as a first language (a speaker’s native and often only language), as a second language (in addition to a native language, but used regularly for important matters), and as a foreign language (used for special purposes, with various degrees of
fluency and frequency).

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The English language is spoken by those
who have learned it as their mother tongue or as an additional language. However,
the most influential form of English is the standard one written by the British and
American authors and it should be obvious by now that the importance of that
form is due not to any inherent virtues it may possess, but wholly to its usefulness
to people around the world, whatever their native language.