this post was submitted on 05 Aug 2026
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Funny thing is, there are thousands of UK accents that are as different from each other as they are from the generic American accent. Granted, there's variety in the US as well, but the concentration is higher in the UK, as we've had towns and villages for thousands of years within 20 miles of each other that had their own unique way of speaking that often only locals can understand without effort.
So yeah, when you say 'British accent' that means basically nothing to anyone in the UK.
I recently found about a small corner of Lancashire (about two towns) where the accent is still rhotic and they pronounce Rs. Like, what the fuck?
Yeah, you have to say "Bri'ish" or they won't understand you.
My British accent hits a very hard and accentuated T.
ow! right in the accent!
If your T is so hard, you could probably get a water softener.
No need, you can get special teabags for hard water
https://britishfooddepot.com/yorkshire-tea-hard-water-80-pack/
I'll look into it. My T levels have been making me so hard, maybe a water softener would help.
It's the same with Scottish accents - the English think there's just one, but there's an big range. Living here for 30+ years I can identify Orkney, Highlands, Western Isles, Weegie, Reekie (posh and non-posh), Aberdeen and Galloway. That last one is odd, it sounds almost Geordie and the locals call it "Galloway Irish".
Grew up in Galloway. It's the rest of you who are accenting wrong.
i need to move, y'all have the best names
The names translate as Glaswegian (from Glasgow) and Edinburgh.Reekie means smokey, the city used to have a serious smog problem.
Tell me about it - i live in Shetland, which is wildy different from our closest neighbours in Orkney, which to my ears sounds like Welsh!
Saying "generic American accent" is about as valuable as someone doing a cockney accent and saying it's generic British.
I remember seeing some claim they did a study of English accents around the world and when they tried to average them all they got something similar to how people talk in Boston. Which I must say that's hard to believe, but fuck do I know
I mean, how do you "average out" accents?
pick the vowels and consonants in a word with lots of the vowels and consonants that change between accents, then chart them. then pick the mode for each individual sound. i know it sounds ghotiy but it works.
Related: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G72tZdjnS2A
I take your point, which was why I added the next sentence acknowledging the variety of US accents. I'd argue that the Mid-Atlantic accent that most (but certainly not all) movie stars use is the closest thing to said generic accent.
I speak a couple of languages with enough fluency to spot accents (including English, having lived in Britain for more than a decade) and in my experience even small countries have lots of distinct regional accents.
That which you describe is pretty much true everywhere with all languages - people from abroad who don't speak the language can't really spot accents unless they're at the fluency level of speaking that language and even those from countries were the same language is spoken can't really tell apart most of the accents in that different country beyond rough categories (so for the British Isles that would be "English" accent, "Scottish" accent and "Irish" accent).
That makes sense. However, as we're exposed to American media arguably as much as our own—and it's the same language—my contention is that I can easily hear extremely distinct differences between, say, Birmingham, Glasgow, Newcastle, Liverpool, and Cornwall, so just calling it a "British accent" and attaching connotations of pretension and upper class to it makes no sense in my mind. For example, does the character Daphne in Frasier sound the same to an American as James Bond? Does Harry Potter's accent sound the same as Tommy Shelby's? To me absolutely not, but perhaps it is because im more attuned through living here.
As an American I've seen enough brits speak to notice different accents, but I couldn't tell you where any of them go on a map. And I kinda have to stop and think to notice that there are different accents there because all of them just register as "English/Welsh" or "Scottish".
I have a similar experience with Canadian accents but I can usually tell Ontario apart. And I can kinda tell the difference between a kiwi and and aussie accent, but I gotta think about which it is and I definitely couldn't tell Western Australia from Sydney from Queensland
Oh yeah - as I said, I lived in Britain for over a decade and I totally get how one can hear people who have no familiarity with Britain talking about the "British accent" and mentaly comment "you have no clue what's you're talking about".
It's just because I actually like learning languages, can notice accents in various languages and have thought about it, that I came up with an intellectual explanation of why that would be and that's what I put forward (well, only part of the explanation, the whole thing would end up talking about Eskimo familiarity with ice and snow and how they have far more words for variants of it in their laguage than everybody else).
I was thinking that somebody from an English speaking country has to be exceptionally ignorant to think there is a "British accent" - even I as a Portuguese and well before going to live in Britain recognized "Scottish" accents from "Irish" accents from "English" accents, if only because in films you generally hear actors make those 3 highly distinctive kinds of accent. If I remember it correctly I could even spot scouse and cockney accents as different, even though I had no idea were they came from, but I'm thinking that I myself as a Portuguese can't really tell any of the Brasilian accents apart and it all sounds like a "Brasilian" accent to me, so maybe there's more it it than that - I could long tell apart multiple accents from Britain in a language that's not my native one but can't tell apart Brasilian accents in my own native language, so mere "ignorance" doesn't seem a good explanation.
If anyone doubts this, keep in your head what your idea of a British accent is, then go and find some vids of people talking in the Black Country accent. The old black and white videos are the best - its thought to be the nearest surviving accent from 'Old' English.
It's akin to saying "the generic American accent," Which means absolutely nothing to anyone in the US.
There is one but you didn't notice it.
There is a generic American accent though. News anchors began using it heavily in the 80s because focus groups said it sounded the most neutral and hard to place. ~~I think it’s an older Northern California accent.~~ I must have misremembered
Yeah that's a midlands accent. It sounds hard to place, but you can tell where it isn't. It's not a Philadelphian, or a new Yorker, or anywhere on the east coast really (so many accents over there). Definitely not Californian or southern. So really it just sounds like the midwest (not Minnesota) or like it might be Pacific Northwest. The big thing though is it's easy to understand. Boston or Baltimore for example would be terrible accents to make the default for newscasters.
Really it's like how the BBC has an accent
Nah, the San Jose local accent is distinctive and it's not on any national news.
The newscaster accent from the '80s was a real thing but it was upper-midwest. Tom Brokaw is the canonical example.
Go tell that to any linguist and get laughed at.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_American_English
please don't hug them to death, but https://www.dialectsarchive.com/ is a very valuable resource for actors and linguists. if you want to contribute to the archive, i haven't looked in a while but they were accepting submissions
Thank you for agreeing with me, and providing sources to back up my point.
To repeat my point,
Stating that there exists a generic UK accent is as useless as suggesting there exists a generic US accent. The wikipedia article suggests that linguists by and large agree with me. So again, thanks.
You and your point maybe ought to take a little break from internet stranger fight time
That's so sweet of you to care so much 😘
There are more varieties of accents inside London than across the entire US. You understood their point, no need to be pedantic.
Their point is equally pedantic.
You guys are all shallow and pedantic.
Shallow and pedantic
also people judge you for your accent a lot more there than in the USA
americans are really only mostly familiar with the posh accent or cockney anyway.
Familiar? Yes. Do we care? Not in the slightest.
Yesterday at my flight with British Airways there was a stewardess with a heavy Liverpool accent. It sounded so nice.
UK having 1,000 accents to sound inbred in instead of America's 5ish is pretty neat!