Reported Speech: preference for using that after say/tell

I don’t know about television, but at least in Google Books it is the British who are little more likely to use that to introduce reported speech. Or, more precisely, were in the second half of the 1900s. The difference is slight though. It would take an avid reader with a superhuman ability to estimate relative frequencies to spot the difference.

Mucking around a bit with Paint I managed to put a few Google Ngrams together for easy comparison:

Source: British Englis Ngram and American English Ngram.

This pick up a lot of different stuff, like “he said he would”, “John said she was”, etc. But it also picks up “‘Yes,’ said she”. So I looked up these longer strings, that are less likely to turn up false positives, and the result are qualitatively the same:

Source: British English Ngram and American English Ngram.

With “told me” that is used a lot more, but the again the British are a little keener on it than Americans:

Source: British English Ngram and American English Ngram

And just on more longer, single string to make sure there is nor funny composition effect biassing results:

Source: British English Ngram and American English Ngram.