English Language Learners Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for speakers of other languages learning English. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
When a teacher wrote this in an email to me:
"Sorry for the late reply!"
I want to tell her that I do not mind it even though it is the email that I have been eagerly waiting for a few days.
I used 2 for friends, but I am not sure if 1 is appropriate for someone with a higher social status, such principal, professors.
Another option -- depending on if you will be replying in email, in detail -- is to thank her happily for the information in the email, respond to that as appropriate, and just not mention anything about the apology one way or the other. In a face-to-face conversation, you could say, "It's all right" to an apology or some other small-talk, but making a point to address the "sorry I'm late" in an email would generally need to be done with humor or other truthful understanding about busy lives. E.g., after an ice storm, I was able to write things like, "No worries; turned out I lost Internet for three days anyway!"
(But if you do acknowledge the apology instead of just letting it pass off and indicating your no-hard-feelings by how you react in the rest of the message, another possible reply would be, "I understand; life gets busy. Thanks for getting this to me!")
English (at least in many dialects) has less well-defined variations in speech for social status differences.
For a case like this, something like "It's not a problem" or "It's not a big deal" is usually fine. If you want to sound a bit more formal, you might something say "Thanks for the apology, but it's not necessary."
