Judging from the top questions that I read, this is not a site for linguists, at least not ones interested in descriptive rules of language. Nearly all questions asked about standards of written English, which are arbitrary and uninteresting to a linguist, except in that the bickering over what is “proper” might bring to our attention divergent forms among varieties of English.
For people interested in the debate over whether a “correct” English (or any language for that matter) exists, here is an interesting article by Geoffrey Pullum:
Re: written English vs. spoken English
Spoken English is a primary linguistic form while written English is secondary or parasitic on spoken forms, so actually from a linguistic perspective, calling written English a language is wrong. English exists in speakers’ minds and written English is a filtered encoding of that language with certain non-linguistic constraints put upon it (e.g. in my dialect of English, dropping an auxiliary at the beginning of a yes/no question is completely okay, but in writing, I hardly ever do this, unless in a very informal context. This is because written standards tell me not to.)
A lot of the signal in spoken English is carried by tone of voice and emphasis. Which confuses people from cultures where emphasis is not part of the signal, much as English speakers are often confused by tonal languages.
Written English is more formal presumably because it has to get by without that part of the signal.
For people interested in the debate over whether a “correct” English (or any language for that matter) exists, here is an interesting article by Geoffrey Pullum:
http://people.ucsc.edu/~pullum/MLA2004.pdf
Re: written English vs. spoken English Spoken English is a primary linguistic form while written English is secondary or parasitic on spoken forms, so actually from a linguistic perspective, calling written English a language is wrong. English exists in speakers’ minds and written English is a filtered encoding of that language with certain non-linguistic constraints put upon it (e.g. in my dialect of English, dropping an auxiliary at the beginning of a yes/no question is completely okay, but in writing, I hardly ever do this, unless in a very informal context. This is because written standards tell me not to.)