How to Speak American (and other variants on the Queen's English)

How many of us realize, I wonder, just how many varieties of English exist in the world? And how many of us realise it instead? My guess would be somewhere in the region of 360 million in the first case, and roughly 75 million in the second - unless, of course, you count pond-crossers like me, who confuse the data a bit by picking up two Englishes at once.

When I first moved to the US in 2017, I was nervous. Would I lose my native Hiberno-English, my 'what's the story?', my 'any craic?'. Speaking honestly, we have a bit of a grudge in Ireland against American English; the language of Hollywood and Netflix, we feel its encroachment into our everyday conversation to be a tiny invasion of our culture (just tell any Irish person you're going to 'do' Dublin on your vacation and see how swiftly I'm proven right). As time went by, though, I found to my delight that instead of losing something, I was gaining; I was seeing a whole new color in the language I'd known all my life (or should that be colour?).

These days, I move with confidence back and forth between theorizing and philosophising, to-may-to and to-mah-to, it being quarter to six at the moment and it being five forty-five right now, and all the other telltale minutiae that make up my two mother tongues, the new and the old. I think my language and my worldview are the richer for it.

And now that I have those two down, all that's left to learn is Canadian English, Australian English, New Zealand English, South African English, Nigerian English, Jamaican English...No bother, right? (Or is that 'easy as pie'? Or..?)