But even us people that live outside of the US/UK/related countries often got errors marked, because we used the wrong regional variant... In Europe, British English is used as a reference point, but I had a similar problem as GP.
Unless you are writing International Standards. ISO requires British English spellings in documents.
Anecdotal counterpoint, but… I’m a British English speaker, but many of my colleagues are Continental Europeans, for whom English is their second language. Part of my job involves copy editing and, almost without exception, their output is written in American English.
Why though? I think you missed my point with the rationale for this. See below.
> But even us people that live outside of the US/UK/related countries often got errors marked, because we used the wrong regional variant... In Europe, British English is used as a reference point, but I had a similar problem as GP.
That makes perfect sense though? The point wasn't "act American because you're in America", the point was "they're trying to teach you to communicate with {whatever audience they believe you will most often find yourself needing to cater to in the future}". Obviously in Europe they deem that to be British-English speakers. In America it'd obviously be American-English. etc.
If I remember correctly BBC Basic accepted COLOUR as well as COLOR keywords to be more approachable to primary school children who were native English speakers.
It was a bad show that they allowed COLOR as well.
As each keyword was saved as a code - did COLOR and COLOUR really map to two different codes?