If you write to them and drop it in that's fine then .

Let's let's get straight what we are talking about then .

So that is it then .

- Yeah. I could scare you, Auntie June.

- Could ya.

- Yeah.

- Go on then

- This tastes lovely! Want a taste?

- Go on then .

What pub is that then ?

So What about this then ?

- How was your weekend? - Crap. - Oh, no, why's that, then?

In all positions, then as a linking adverb is nearly twice as frequent in British conversation as in American; on the other hand, so in the same use is half again as frequent in American conversation as in British. A distinctive British use of then is in terminal position: Who's a clever boy then? • Well, there you are then.

BrE AmE then . 5824 3173 then ? 4741 1196 go on then . 142 2 come on then . 105 3

Grover (now two-and-a-half) continues on merrily acquiring British English. Her first language, but not her mother('s) tongue. I was caught off guard the other day when she sounded so exactly like her father, saying, when told that it was too late to go to the park. I'm also keenly aware of her Britishness whenever she urges me to follow her, for she never sayswithout following it withis very much a spoken British English thing to do. It is not the use ofabout distant time () nor the use that's about logical consequences (), which are universal uses of--though BrE uses the latter twice as much as AmE does (see below). These might also occur at the end of a sentence, but they're not what I'm talking about. Instead, let's look at some examples from the British National Corpus (BNC).It means something like 'in that case'. But to use it in that way in AmE (to me at least) communicates an impatience or accusation.andare things one hears all the time in England, clearly talking about 'the now', rather than 'the then'.is used for all sorts of things. In this one, it means something like 'give it a try, I dare you':But in this one it accepts an offer:In that case it means something like 'Oh, I know I shouldn't accept your offer, but yes, please'.In the spoken part of the BNCquestion-finaloccurs nearly as much as statement/request-final(since I'm just searching by punctuation, I can't tell the difference between declarative and imperative sentences). For example (from BNC):Now, I know some Americans will be reading this and saying "but I say things like that", and I don't doubt it. It's not that Americans never putat the end of a sentence--it's that they don't use it in all the same ways that BrE speakers do, and therefore they can misinterpret BrE intentions. As I said above, when I hear a non-temporalat the end of a question (or statement), it implies to my American ears an impatience or accusation--or mistrust. But that's not what (in most cases like the above), a BrE speaker would hear. And Americans wouldn't tend to usein completely sympathetic sentences like the following (from the Mike Leigh film):As for numbers, we can start with Algeo's British or American English (I've deleted his source citations for examples, since they're abbreviated to opacity).For sentence-final (or "terminal") position, I've got the following figures of occurrences per 100 million words by searching BNC and the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA):As you can see, it's not that AmE doesn't putat the end of a sentence or question, it's that it's done a lot more in BrE. The commonest ground between BrE and AmE is the temporal use like, and('next')When we search in a context where the temporal meaning is much less likely (in the last two rows), we see the BrE uses ofoutnumbering the AmE ones by very large margins indeed.What do you think then?p.s. I know some of you haven't got(ten) into Twitter, but that's where I'm hanging out between blog posts. I've added a Twitter feed gadget to the left, where you can see my most recent tweets, which may include the Difference of the Day.