I believe it was Samuel Clemens who called America and Britain “two nations separated by a common language.”
Sometimes the inquirer asks, Was it Wilde or Shaw? The answer appears to be: both. In The Canterville Ghost (1887), Wilde wrote: We have really everything in common with America nowadays except, of course, language. However, the 1951 Treasury of Humorous Quotations (Esar & Bentley) quotes Shaw as saying: England and America are two countries separated by the same language, but without giving a source. The quote had earlier been attributed to Shaw in Readers Digest (November 1942). Much the same idea occurred to Bertrand Russell (Saturday Evening Post, 3 June 1944): It is a misfortune for Anglo-American friendship that the two countries are supposed to have a common language, and in a radio talk prepared by Dylan Thomas shortly before his death (and published after it in The Listener, April 1954) - European writers and scholars in America were, he said, up against the barrier of a common language.
Inevitably this sort of dubious attribution has also been seen: Winston Churchill said our two countries were divided by a common language (The Times, 26 January 1987; The European, 22 November 1991.)
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Don't feel bad, I thought at first it was Winston Churchill.