Should the US adopt British spelling?

[Filuwaúrdjan]

I prefer -ise to -ize, but that's about it.

Actually 'ize' is also correct in English as written in Britain and would generally be considered to be slightly more formal. The absolute differences are the ones imposed by American spelling reformers.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

This.  The "British" spelling you point out is actually French spelling.  The French influence ons why it's "pork" and not "pig".

This isn't correct: the Old English word for both was 'swine'; 'pig' is Middle English though does appear to have an Old English root. Besides, do you use a different word in the United States? Swinemeat, perhaps?

[Filuwaúrdjan]

I'm biased but American spelling is generally more phonetic so I feel that it's better. Also, American spelling just removes a lot of unnecessary letters from words.

The amusing part is that this is not the case elsewhere: e.g. the sounded vowel in 'colour' is not an 'o'. Anyway, having a spelling system that operates according to a particular set of formalized rules is one of the things that makes 'American English' a genuine distinct form of English (i.e. 'American English' is a real phenomenon, whereas there is no 'Canadian English', simply English as spoken by Canadians) and that fact in itself is now an important part of American culture.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

A former colleague of mine in England was an avid student of the language and its dialects.  He once told me there was more English language variation in a single English county than in the entire U.S., and more variation in a single U.S. state than in all of Australia.  I don't know if that's really true or a bit of exaggeration.

So long as the English county isn't Rutland it's true enough. And Australia doesn't have regional dialects at all: there are accents based on things like class, social status and ethnicity and there's also a Tasmanian accent (though not one for the other states!) but nothing that you could call a dialect.