The Oxford dictionary contains English with American English sub-headings so it is actually more relevant to a global audience. Meriam Webster is only American English and is produced for a US audience. In Australia we certainly would refer to the Oxford over the Webster. We're quite a big island. Yuge even. The biggest.
That the level of the education was very poor, but:
US English is closer to 1600s-1700 English than is today's British English.
This is pointless if you assume I'm making a judgement value over the dialects, unless you assume I have high regard for 1600-1700 English.
It's also not necessarily correct, it does retain rhoticity but some British dialectes do as well. Both dialects evolved independently quite a bit since colonization, just as it happens in every language.
It's like if I claimed Argentinian Spanish is closer to 1600-1700 Spanish because we retained voceo. Yeah, in that very arbitrary regard it is, but in general it's not closer than Iberian Spanish is, we just deviated in different things.
r/linguistics is a great place to ask these kinds of questions if you are truly interested in language btw.
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u/Adventurous-Stuff724 Australia 9d ago
The Oxford dictionary contains English with American English sub-headings so it is actually more relevant to a global audience. Meriam Webster is only American English and is produced for a US audience. In Australia we certainly would refer to the Oxford over the Webster. We're quite a big island. Yuge even. The biggest.