British English or American English?

They sure live in a 'flat' and ride the 'lift' or the 'tube' (in London)

Handley_Page said:

Go on then; tell me which part of Yorkshire that is.

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If I had to guess I would say West Riding. Probably spoken by someone over sixty years old. I'm from Hull or 'ull, as they say back 'ome. My parents both had Hull accents. When my dad got mad he would slip into a dialect of sorts.

Geroutway or gerouto'it. Don' laike, Lump it, was one of his favourite sayings.

A girlfriend came to the door one day and was impressed by my mum's accent and clothes. My mum was the daughter of a fisherman and made her own clothes to save money. There is no way in 'ell anyone from back 'ome would be impressed by a lower class Hull accent. Most times I mention I was born in Hull, Hessle actually, I get a "Too bad" from English chaps I play FPS with.

Honestly, I use whatever version of English the spell checker in Word is set to.

Since I live in the US (even though I'm very British by birth and upbringing,) I use US English. It's just easier for my editor (who is also US based) and frankly, every one tends to understand it.

Now dialog... that's another thing.

If you are going to use Cockney Rhyming slang (or indeed, any kind of locational based colloquialism) you need to find some way to explain it.

E.g.

"Oi, Jessie! The trouble is on the Dog! You wanna take that or what, old son?"

Doesn't mean a lot unless you know that "Trouble" means "wife" and"Dog" means "Phone".

Doing something like this might work though (and to be clear, I'm actually using this in my 4th Ingrams story, which is set in the UK, even though the protagonist is a Yankee Doodle Dandy.

E.g.
"Oi, Jessie! The trouble is on the Dog! You wanna take that or what, old son?"

April's face crinkled as she sat there, trying to parse the sentence, desperately trying to remember the sheet she'd been given by the lads at the UK office when she'd arrived.

Wait, so trouble. That's trouble and strife, right? So his wife is...wait, what's dog? Is it stairs? His wife is on the stair, that doesn't make sense. Oh PHONE. Dog and bone. That's right. The wife is on the phone.

Derek stood looking over at April, watching her expression as she worked it out with wry amusement.

"His wife is on the phone?" She asked triumphantly.

Derek snorted and said, "Yeah. Well done. Now, I gotta go put my whistle on, so I can look good when I drop some richards."

Aprils face fell as she listened to this. Surely it was all gibberish? He was "having a laugh" as they put it over here.

There is a difference between using origin-specific phrasing and spelling. They seem to be becoming muddled together here. The difference between using boot and trunk is not a spelling issue. The difference between using flavour and flavor is.

If you are writing in American style, you could have an Englishman visiting New York use the word "boot" for the trunk of a car in dialogue, but you wouldn't use the "flavour" spelling in his dialogue just because he's English. Spelling and punctuation are the same in this regard. You pick a style for the entire story and you remain consistent with it. The only difference is that if the English version of a word is pronounced differently from the American version, you might go with a variant spelling--but that's kicking over into guidelines for dialect.