WTF accent do you have?

[Brown, Jon Brow]

I'm a great fan of accents and dialect, particularly regional English accents. But why is it that so many of us are so bad at placing accents?

For example, my brother is from Carlisle and has a Cumbrian accent. When he lived at Bolton in Lancashire many of the locals said he sounded like a Geordie. However, when I visited Newcastle with him the locals said he sounded most like Peter Kay, who is famous for coming from where? Oh yeah Bolton! So which one is it?

And this is northern Englanders mixing up other northern accents. It does get worse though. My work colleague is originally from Walsall so to us up here in't north he sounds like a Brummie. But he insists the Birmingham accents is much stronger than his and when he goes to visit is family back home they all say he sounds northern and like a farmer. For some reason though when they try to torment him about it they do a Somerset style farmer accent. That's southern, not northern!

On a more global scale the Americans usually expect the English to talk either like the Queen or Dick Van Dyke, so I know many fellow northerners who have been told by Americans that they sound Australian.

However, us British usually can't tell the difference between Americans and Canadians, and many of us have no idea about the regional accents of Ireland.

So what accent do you have? (probably best to give an example of a celebrity with a similar accent to help us place it )

[donKey jote]

when I lived in the UK, the closest anybody could place my Donkey accent was "northern", in fact it seemed to annoy quite a few that they couldn't narrow it down to within the nearest 3 miles

The Borrico accent is a pretty neutral Madrid-Castilian (including the typical "la dije" instead of "le dije" ), and my Esel is a pretty neutral Hannoverian Hochdeutsch, albeit with the odd grammatical error

[Gregor-y]

I'm told a few words from my upbringing in Pittsburgh slip in when I'm not paying attention. I've been in Chicago just as long but haven't picked up a thing. A lot of American accents (particularly in cities) are vanishing as people move about much more than they used to.

When I was working in Dublin my coworkers were from Belfast, Sligo and Bristol. That Bristol kid got a lot of stick around the office in general but gave as good as he got. It may not have been the best employer but the office sure was fun.

[gadjo_dilo]

Never talked to a british/american/canadian/australian person to know if I have a possible accent but I'm sure I'm a lost case of mispronunciation.
As for Romanian I was proud to speak the ''literary'' version until last year when I started to speak with the annoying Transylvanian accent and regional words. It started as a joke, I was trying to mock our manager who's an impossible person and speaks like a peasant but soon it became a habit and now I can't drop it.

[anfield5]

I'm a bit of a mongrel. I was born in Liverpool and do have a scouse accent, but this is not a true scouse accent because I have lived in NZ fo much of my life. Luckily I don't really have a kiwi accent where most vowels are pronounced differently.
i.e. in Kiwi English 'e' and 'a' are often pronounced 'i', 'i' is somewhere between an 'i' and a 'u', for example our awesome world shot-put champion Val Adamas is pronounced as Vil Idims. etc. As accents go though our kiwi one isn't too bad, it is easy to understand (unlike geordie and strong scouse) and unlike Brummie, kiwi speakers don't sound like we are apologising all the time

[J4MIE]

I don't have an accent But I love listening to other accents, one if the many advantages of living in the North East

[Brown, Jon Brow]

I don't have an accent But I love listening to other accents, one if the many advantages of living in the North East

How can you not have an accent?

[Brown, Jon Brow]

Best thing ever: (Warning: contains expletives)

[youtube]SGxKhUuZ0Rc[/youtube]

[donKey jote]

[Mintexmemory]

And of course all Scots sound like Billy Connoly, Groundsman Willie or Shrek to Americans!!
God knows what they'd make of Rab C Nesbitt!
Me - solid London. Real central London and not what the rest of the country thinks of as 'cockney', which is really east end and not cockney at all!
However I can tell the difference between Bratford, Leeds and 'ull (lived there for 11 years). Similarly smoggy, mackem and geordie. I know my Norfolk from my Somerset but my attempts at a welsh accent morph into sub-continent asian/ geordie!! As a matter of interest Anfield have you avoided the Antipodean Interogative inflection?