I did try to qualify my comment as you suggested.
It does sound a tad contradictory now I read it back to myself. But I do realise that after being surrounded by people with roughly the same accent for a while, someone who speaks clearly and has no discernible regional nuance (of which there are plenty in Northern Ireland despite its small size by area and population) may seem like they have no accent at all.
I’m curious. Did you have trouble understanding me when we met at The Pub?
I might digitise some tapes I have of a man from an island off Donegal talking to my relatives in West Tyrone (family are from near Omagh) and see what people make of them.
God, that was a syllable taffy pull. Was he imitating someone kneewalking drunk or are there responsible people who come in to work speaking like that?
Now that we know that you’ve read both my post and Mississippienne’s, I’m curious as to whether you have any response to the actual point we were making.
I’ve been to Strabane quite a few times, never registered that the accent was particularly more dense than the surrounding area. Got anything more to go on so I can google around for the clip you mention?
As for myself, another vote for no issue understanding Americans pretty much no matter what the accent. In fact I can manage just about any accented English with occasional issues with south africans because they use different vowels to everyone else.
As a humorous aside. My 2 sets of grandparents had to have an interpreter at my parent’s wedding. One set is from Donegal, the other from Lancashire, both speak what would broadly be described as English (although very heavily dialected).
My own accent (a mix of my parents mentioned above and my upbringing in the south of Ireland along with a period in London) is odd to say the least, most British people can place me as Irish but most Irish people think I’m American.
Heh, well, I had no trouble at all with that, but then I’m Glaswegian 
My own accent is nothing like as broad, though.
Can you explain one more time exactly what the point you were making is? Because unless I’m mistaken, I think I covered it in the very first sentence of the OP.
I was going to say that Audrey Hepburn was Dutch-Belgian or something.
On the “Mary, marry, merry” thing: I was 40 before I was aware anyone pronounced them differently. (I’ve lived in Illinois and California). I understand that some New York accents make the distinction.
Edit: never mind, I was just repeating things said earlier.
Look, I’m a huge fan of British productions and all those fine British actors (Kate Beckinsale’s accent is flawless, for example). But this is just wacky. I can tell that Hugh Laurie’s House accent is faked, but even granting you that one as a “good” American accent, this generalization just doesn’t hold.
There are loads of British shows – Doctor Who and Fawlty Towers come to mind immediately – which prominently display many, many British TV actors’ absolute lack of facility with American accents.
I’m sorry that I singled you out, and I should have noted that you indicated that you meant “almost no accent” within the context of Northern Irish accents.
I actually mean to defend the use of the shorthand “no accent” notion in general, as long as it is understood that it is subjective. If in a non-accent-related thread somebody from Arizona posts that “X has almost no accent”, we generally know that they mean “has a generic American accent” (I suppose they might specifically mean “has an Arizona accent”, but that seems unlikely). But when we are comparing and contrasting accents, as in threads such as this, I think ambiguous terms such as “no accent” should be avoided.
How did it happen in Buffy? We actively had campaigns for Homecoming Queen, and something that I’ll call campaigns for “Covergirl” of our senior magazine.
Yes, there is actually a valid linguistic concept of a “standard dialect” or a “standard language.” It just doesn’t necessarily mean what some people think it means.
From wikipedia:
“Non-standard” doesn’t mean “incorrect” or “ignorant.” It just means it’s not the standard, as defined linguistically. RP is a prestige accent. It’s not necessarily a standard and it’s not a dialect.
“Newscaster English” is very hard to define. It’s an accent, or, rather, a group of accents.
There is a Standard American English dialect. It’s the one taught in schools that requires, for example, “I’m not” rather than “I ain’t.” The latter might be correct in some non-standard dialects, but not in the standard.
Oh, I’m a native Californian, and I’m with an earlier guy; that California accent would definitely be notable. I picked him out as a southern California guy right away, probably surfer or beach dweller, which was confirmed later on in the recording. I didn’t catch the Valley influence though.
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I agree with most of what you are saying, but I think you’re mixing up “dialect” and “accent” here. For example, the Standard British English dialect can be spoken in a variety of accents, including, say, R.P. and General Educated Scottish.
Similarly, a Scouse or Manc accent can be used to speak Scouse or Manc dialect or Standard British English.
The point we’re making is – Da da da DA – that your concept of a neutral American accent east of the Mississippi is nonsense. It’s not spoken any more phonetically than your ‘English’ example was. Take a look at a map and see where MS is. I grew up east of the Mississippi but I don’t sound like New Yorkers, or Bostonians, not even when I’m code-switching. I can switch into a dialect that sounds vaguely Northern, but not really like its from anywhere in particular. But my natural accent uses very different vowels and grammar.
What, this?
Possibly, but then you said:
And then, when Indistinguishable described that as “silliness”, illustrated your point of view with this:
Which, as has been pointed out, is hardly comparing like with like. To illustrate British English, you present a phonetic impression of one particular, very strong regional accent – one that very few British people would put forward as a model of how English should be spoken. To illustrate American English, you give us… standard written English.
Now, I appreciate that you think, as you said, that American English sounds closer to what (you imagine) written English represents, but you put a fair bit of thought into producing that phonetic transcription of a Londoner – are you really telling us that you can’t think of any other way of writing the speech of an American? How would you write a phonetic spelling of “gone”, for instance?
Are you still of your original opinion? Do the versions that Mississippienne and I suggested strike you as plausible transcriptions of American English? How close do you think they are to the written English?
I mean, we’re all biased to one degree or another; I just wondered whether anything that had been said here had made you feel a little less so.
When you think about it, the idea that a particular modern American accent is the most “accent-less” or “closest to neutral” or whatever is really odd; why on Earth would it be that, in all the centuries of English usage, no one ever figured out how to do it without all those crazy modulations and deviations from the norm until the late 20th century or so in a small region somewhere in the U.S.? Did we have top scientists working on the problem and a great public awareness campaign to convince the public to play along while the rest of the English-speaking world was content to ignore it?
acsenray writes:
> I agree with most of what you are saying, but I think you’re mixing up “dialect”
> and “accent” here. For example, the Standard British English dialect can be
> spoken in a variety of accents, including, say, R.P. and General Educated
> Scottish.
>
> Similarly, a Scouse or Manc accent can be used to speak Scouse or Manc dialect
> or Standard British English.
I think I disagree. If you were to use the grammar, vocabulary, etc. of Standard British English but used the pronunciation of Scouse or Manc or some Scottish area, what people would probably say about you is that you sound like an educated Scouser or Manchestrian or Scot who has wiped out any nonstandard grammar, vocabulary, etc. from his speech but who continues to ue Scouse, Manc, or Scottish pronunciation. That happens occasionally. That’s not what is usually meant by Standard British English though. There is an accent (i.e., a way of pronouncing words) for Standard British English which is not the same as Scouse, Manc, or Scottish English. If you were a foreigner learning English (in the U.K. or in some country where you wer told that you were learning British English) from a typical course, you would be taught to speak the pronunciations of Standard British English. Similarly, if you were a foreigner learning English (in the U.S. or in some country where you were told that you were learning American English), you would be taught to speak the pronunciations of Standard American English.