I live in the UK and I have cortana.
The way I got her to work was to change my lanuage and region to US and then I installed WP8.1. I had cortana on my phone but i couldnt use it because it didnt recognise my language. So i went into the speech setting and pressed on english (United States). It download the language and then it went to the cogs screen to update for about 10 minutes and then cortana started working. I also changed my region in my outlook.com account settings.
The way I got her to work was to change my lanuage and region to US and then I installed WP8.1. I had cortana on my phone but i couldnt use it because it didnt recognise my language. So i went into the speech setting and pressed on english (United States). It download the language and then it went to the cogs screen to update for about 10 minutes and then cortana started working. I also changed my region in my outlook.com account settings.