Everyone Has an Accent
&gt;that nobody hearing their American accents presumes that they are less capable, less ambitious or less honest than if their R’s had a nicer trill<p>I don&#x27;t know if i&#x27;d say...less capable personally, but I&#x27;m a Urban-Modern-Australian english speaker, as distinct from what I&#x27;ll call the lower-class suburban australian, rural-strine, or &quot;snooty adeladian-recieved&quot;. I&#x27;ve included 4 accents there where most older australian academic literature seems to recognise 3, and I&#x27;m not including the various ethno-tinges based on how you might pronounce the phrase &quot;fully-sick sub-woofer&quot; for example.<p>I&#x27;ve been personally told my accent sounds &quot;upper-class and educated&quot; from an american perspective, which I find hilarious considering I think i sound like an absolute bogan whenever in the presence of americans&#x2F;english. However, I&#x27;ve also been told by non-english speaking persons that they really like the way myself and my wife speak: something to do with clear annunciation or something.<p>Anyway, back to the main point: I question whether this is true, because you can bet I pick up on and have various aesthetic opinions on the various english accents. I find it very hard to believe that there are not connotations attached to how various english speakers speak and pronounce other languages.  This would make english some kind of &quot;magical&quot; language that overcomes social-regional-contextual interpretation, and I simply do not believe that can be the case.  And i know enough american friend&#x27;s experiences overseas.  I know there were parts&#x2F;towns of the middle east while travelling I was advised not to stay in for very long with my accent, and I am well aware of the general advice for certain american accents to take advantage of the ambiguity and identify as canadian while travelling.<p>For the record, the non-exhaustive list of accents I identify and their subjective opinion are something along the lines of (keeping in mind, I&#x27;m not saying these are my explicit-acted on opinions, they&#x27;re the subjective-connotations I recognise them as carrying in my own subculture):<p>&gt; Californian: loud, extroverted, a little bit of extroverted stupidity, annoying.<p>&gt; New-york: loud, extroverted, annoying in a different way.<p>&gt; Boston-twang: personally, a bit humorous, not exactly intellectual (park the car in the harvard yard)<p>&gt; Various-southern US: slow, naive but friendly<p>&gt; English-RP: snooty, but never hear anyone who actually talks like this, except on some BBC programs, where sometimes it comes across as a bit comical like someone&#x27;s taking the piss.<p>&gt; English-other: pretty friendly&#x2F;approachable in general, obviously can&#x27;t list all the many english-native accents<p>&gt; Scottish: cool, though stronger ones border on unintelligible until you get used to it<p>&gt; Irish: extremely cool + attractive<p>&gt; New Zealand: its practically urban-australian except for a handful of fish and chips-esque give-aways, basically one of us<p>&gt; Wog-english (using the term in a friendly way, not as a put-down): generally to cover the greek, lebanese, italian accents.  Does have lower-middle class connotations for better or worse.