Quote:
Originally Posted by pdurrant
This isn't strictly a British thing, but just some British publishers. I have many books by British authors published by British publishers that use double quotes for direct speech.
E.g. English Farming and Why I Turned It Up by Ernest Bramah. Published in London in 1894. Double quotes throughout.
I much prefer double quotes for speech myself.
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I'm not sure if this is correct, but the way I was told it was that, originally, everyone used double quotes. The use of single quotation marks arose in academic writing, and then migrated into fiction.
I wasn't aware of there being any bias toward one or the other in particular countries.