Why do obviously British people use American English when writing in cyberspace?

Question

No dumb *** answers please, this is for my sophomore paper I gotta finish before the prom tonight.

Answer 1

If you mean that British people use US vocabulary, bear in mind that a lot of what we take to be American is common in certain British dialects. For example, people from Liverpool call trousers pants.

It can be difficult to define what counts as US English and British English. Words move back and forth over the Atlantic quite a lot - I believe that "wanker" is becoming more common Stateside now. I also notice that while I use the word "mean" to mean "tight with money/miserly", most Brits I know use it to mean "nasty/mean-spirited" now.

With regard to those words that are definitely American in some sense: well, we do get a lot of US cultural imports here. They're obviously gonna have some effect.

If you're talking about spelling, I suppose that's just UK people who visit a lot of American sites and read a lot of American books etc., so they're so familiar with US spelling they start to use it. Of course, some apparently US spellings (like -ize for -ise) are actually acceptable in the UK too.

Answer 2

I'm British and i write fast using the words and phrases which first come to my mind. Often what people refer to as being americanism is just short hand english or dialect english. This is from my point of view of course. There are genuine amricanisms of course like 'sucks', these are prob picked up from films. but words like 'pants' for trousers are dialect english that have become the main stay in am. eng. Another point is that most of the 1st lang. eng. lang. users on the internet are yank and people just try to fit in. I lived in scotland for a while (i'm english) and soon enough began, 1st using 'aye' a lot more than usual instead of 'yes' (we say 'aye' only rarely to mean 'yes' in the part of england i come from), to use the terminology of the people around me. but, i think, 1st n foremost u shouldnt confuse am eng with shorthand eng like gotta gunna etc. enjoy the prom and get drunk.