I always thought gray was american and grey was British. I was tought to spell gray in the states but my Canadian spell check wants the color gray to be the colour grey.  I always heard that 17th century British English sounded more like the broague of the New England Yankees or even the Apalachian Mountain People then the speach of modern London. I have noticed that British people are sounding more and more like Australians to my ear... I can now only understand about half the characters on the British TV show Coronation Street when they speak. I have read a number of studies that claim that the North Western Standard used on American television is pushing regional dialects to become more prounouced in the US. I have seen that English speaking Canadians, especially those in the media, are adopting a more pronounced Canadian accent that when I was a kid was mainly a characature or joke. They are also adopting an Anglophile vocabulary and avoiding certain "American words"  which were once commonplaceand substituting Britishwords in their place. An accent I find interesting is the Alophone accent of Montreal, it is used by English speakers of non-British hertitage even if they are born and reared speking English only... it sounds sort of like an Eastern European accent but I know lots of people from Mediteranian and Middle Eastern families who have it. The Canadian accent that is really mysterious to me is the Acadian accent, these are native french speakers who sound like they come from the American  South, I have heard them complain of being identified as Americans by French speakers in Montereal who do not belive they are actually Francophones. As part of the push to make French Canada a truly french society they are adopting standard Buisness French more in line with Europen French and turning away from traditional Quebec French... I heard on the radio about a small island fishing community where the people speak an old dying form of French but when the people spoke it was the standard Quebecoise of thirty or forty years ago that you would have heard from nearly anyone in Montereal. Lately I have noticed that the speach of actresses in American movies from the ninteen eighties is starting to sound as stylized as that of actresses in the nineen forties!