I’m sure you’re right. Without even knowing it, we’re all applying different comparison criteria that are influenced by local factors.
Yikes, that’s just…horrible. Part mid-atlantic, part-antipodean, like no British (or other) accent in existence!
Why isn’t he wearing a shirt? Oops … I posted that before I saw that he did a complete strip tease.
Speaking as an American, I don’t think his American accent is all that bad. It’s pretty good, actually. I’d like to hear him keep it up for a while.
His “regular” accent sounds like a poor attempt at R.P.
Presumably that’s because he’s American. He most certainly isn’t British or Australian.
You’re right of course that perception of accent (and perception of similarities) depends on your own background and what you have been brought up to consider “normal”.
But is it really subjective? Maybe, I don’t know. In theory it should be possible to enumerate features that two accents have in common, and state objectively that (for example) a New Zealand and an Australian accent are more similar than either is to a Boston accent.
The problem might be that we may disagree as to which features are important, or what weighting should attach to each one.
Out of curiosity, when you say my choice of groupings makes little sense to you, would you at least agree that {NZ, Australia, S Africa} sound similar? If so, then we only disagree on whether they are collectively similar to SE English accents, which disagreement is easily explained.
Nope, definitely not British; I agree. Not even close.
I’d guess American because of the way he says BirmingHAM, but it would just be a guess.
I’d say that NZ and Oz do, but not SA; not at all. That accent sounds far apart from the other two to my ears.
Yep, dead giveaway in one word.