Google & US/UK English

Not sure which forum this goes in, but if you have GMail, try clicking the "New features!" link at the top-right corner. This will popup a new window displaying all the latest features implemented in GMail. I found this particularly interesting:

English is just another language...
Use Gmail in the language you want! The interface is now available in 12 more languages: Dutch, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Spanish, Russian, simplified and traditional Chinese. And UK English. We like choices. Learn more

Now either this is a joke or there is actually a difference. I tried switching over to UK English and I didn't see anything different. Any ideas?

UK english? I think thats just called english. But americans spell some words differently

Colour - English
Color - Americanish
Grey- English
Gray - Americanish

Night - English
Nite - Americanish

Just examples, hope thats some help

Merkz out

Well I'm aware of that, but is it really a necessary feature to implement? Who cares if a single word is spelled "colour" or "color"? I'm under the impression that perhaps this is some sort of joke, but I was hoping someone else would have more information on this.

A joke? No, definitely not. The english spoken in the UK is infact different from the english spoken in the US. Nevermind slang and accents. THe 'Queens English' is different from Standard American English (abb. SAE). Its not different by much obviously.

Americaners say 'gosh, I'm tired'
Britishers say 'blimy, I'm knackered'

And as pointed out there's colour/color torwards/towards, etc etc.

The Columbia Guide to Standard American English
PBS page on SAE

Any corruption of a brit english is usually refered to as a pidgin english.
Pidgin/English Dictionary
as spoken in Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea
Expressions in Hawaiian Pidgin and English
Pidgin and Creole Languages

Throuhgout what was once the Empire there are variations of english, like jamaican patois.
Patois Sound Clips

It exists in the US too.
Nawlins yatspeak
American Dialect Society

Of course, I am being loose with the terms. Things like Patois and pidgin languages are like proto-languages, whereas dialects are just local variations.
The process can easily be seen in europe. All europe spoke Latin. The latin speaking empire fell, and gradually, people ended up speaking vulgarizations of latin, such as in romania, spain, france, even italy, the homeland of latin.
Heck, look at the Iberian Penninsula. Part speaks spanish, another part speaks Portuguese, and they are two seperate, yet similar languages.
Even inside of spain, there are three different variants of Spanish. THe sort usually taught in the US is castillian spanish. The sort spoken by native speakers is rather different, and not even allways mutually intelligible amoung south americans, let alone iberians and, say, argentinians.
Brazil speaks a type of portuguese. Dominicans and Porto Ricans use very different terminology and what not for example.

Heck, just look at english itself, the sort spoken in britain. Today, supposedly, you can tell what part of a city a person comes from just by their speech, let alone a broad region of the country. Even the english language historically has changed.

Here's the quintissential english heroic epic, Beofwulf
www.engl.virginia.edu...
in old english

I mean, thats unintelligible jibberish, but its english. here's what it sounds like.

And enlish has gone thru a heck of a lot of changes before and since then. It'll continue. Heck, enlgish itself is made up of german french latin and some native words, so of course it'd change! Just look at Beowulf, its the first big english text. Doesn't take place in england. Doesn't concern englishmen.

SO, definitly, google is correct in recognizing some of these differences. I imagine it'd be annoying to be a Britisher and have to allways read American english.