INTERNATIONAL VARIETIES OF ENGLISH spoken language is diverging, the formal written language shows (as yet) little evidence of such divergence. Indeed, one of the many advantages claimed for English is that you can sit down and read a work written in Canada or Australia or Tyneside wherever in the English-speaking world you come from. The differences of grammar between varieties are (as we have seen in Chapter 4) very slight. Latin as a written language lasted virtually into the seventeenth century in Europe, and it could be that English as a written language will outlast spoken English as an international medium.
