Types of World English

US English
US English is of course particularly influential, on account of America's dominance of cinema, television, popular music, trade, and technology, including the Internet. Many terms that enter an Oxford dictionary from the US quickly become established in British English: some examples from the last ten years or so are geek, nerd, school student, and 24/7. Many US equivalents for British terms are familiar: sidewalk for pavement, checkers for draughts, cookie for biscuit, and vest for waistcoat. Other differences are more subtle. Some words have a slightly different form, e.g. dollhouse (US)/doll's house (Brit.), math (US)/maths (Brit.), tidbit (US)/titbit (Brit.), while American constructions that are strange to British ears include I just ate, teach school, and a quarter of ten (rather than a quarter to ten).

Canadian English
Canadian English is subject to the conflicting influences of British and American English. In vocabulary there is a lot of US influence: Canadians use billboard, gas, truck, and wrench rather than hoarding, lorry, petrol, and spanner; but on the other hand they agree with the British in saying blinds, braces, porridge, and tap rather than shades, suspenders, oatmeal, and faucet.

Australian and New Zealand English
The vocabularies of Australian and New Zealand English are very similar. Both have been enriched by words and concepts from the hundreds of indigenous languages that pre-dated European settlers, only about fifty of which continue as first languages. The line between formal and informal usage is perhaps less sharply drawn in Australasian English than it is elsewhere: suffixes such as -o and -ie, giving us expressions such as arvo (afternoon), reffo (refugee), and barbie (barbecue), are freely attached to words even in more formal contexts.

South African English
Since 1994 South Africa has had eleven official languages: English, Afrikaans (descended from Dutch), Zulu, Xhosa, and other largely regional African languages. English is the first language of only about 10 per cent of the population, but the second language of many others. The English of native Afrikaners has inevitably influenced the 'standard' English of white South Africans, examples being such informal usages as the affirmative no, as in 'How are you? - No, I'm fine' and the all-purpose response is it?, as in 'She had a baby last week - is it?'

Indian English
The role of English within the complex multilingual society of India is far from straightforward: together with Hindi it is used across the country, but it can also be a speaker's first, second, or third language, and its features may depend heavily on their ethnicity and caste. The grammar of Indian English has many distinguishing features, of which perhaps the best-known are the use of the present continuous tense, as in 'He is having very much of property', and the use of isn't it as a ubiquitous question tag: 'We are meeting tomorrow, isn"t it?' The first example rejects another characteristic of the language, which is to include intrusive articles such as in or of in idiomatic phrases. Verbs are also used differently, with speakers often dropping a preposition or object altogether: 'I insisted immediate payment', while double possessives - 'our these prices' (instead of the British English 'these prices of ours') - are commonplace.

West Indian English
Standard British English has traditionally been the linguistic model for the Commonwealth Caribbean, although recently the import of US television, radio, and tourism has made American English an equally powerful influence. The many varieties of Creole, influenced by West African languages, are also productive. A characteristic usage is that of the objective pronoun where British English would use the subjective or possessive, as in me can come an go as me please or he clear he throat. Jamaican Creole is the most widely known, and has spread beyond the region, especially to the UK, where it influences the speech of black Britons.