A coworker once had to ask me if I was from Philly, his wife is from there and he thought he picked up on the accent. Incredibly my parents are from Philadelphia but I was born in So Fla and now live in Michigan. That was not the first time someone pegged my accent. But I do not have an accent!
I don’t feel like I have a strong accent, except when I get sleepy or drunk, but people make fun of me for the extreme Southernism of a few of my words - towel and tile, or jewelry and jury, or horror and whore, or pin or pen or pi…ano or pee…ing behind a tree all sound the same from me. 
In Spanish I have a fairly strong northern Mexico accent, enough for anyone to tell where I’m from and to get teased by it - its the Mexican equivalent of a cowboy accent.
In English I usually don’t have one except during long conversations where my pronunciation starts to falter, especially with W-R sounds like in ‘where’ and ‘were’.
I’ve been to Toronto. You do not want to come to Rochester.
R.I.P. Fast Ferry.
I grew up on the east coast, my father is from the midwest and my mother is from the west coast. My accent is fairly generic Northeastern US. I’ve never been made fun of for it, (except by Brits) and I have friends from all over the US.
I have a British RP accent - the kind of RP that most modern newsreaders in the UK have, not the kind the Queen has. (I persist in saying that those accents should have different names, because they’re too different to be lumped together, but others say it doesn’t matter).
It’s not the accent I grew up with - I spoke Estuary English as a kid - but one that I learnt as I got older, partly accidentally due to expanding my vocabulary by way of the dictionary, and partly intentionally because some of my posh friends took the piss out of my accent constantly, and I was young enough to let it affect me.
This accent does lead some people to assume that I’m posh, probably wealthy and from a privileged background. One ex-GF of my GF got really, really angry at me for apparently being posh and looking down on working-class people. From what she eventually said to my GF, I’d said nothing to make her think this - it was just the accent. Her background was definitely far posher than mine, but apparently the accent over-rides all that!
It also occasionally leads people to take me more seriously. My old GP looked at my notes, knew that I was a young single Mum living on a council estate, and barely looked up before just handing over a prescription - until I said thanks. He then sat up, looked at me and started talking to me. It’s happened a few times in less definable, but definitely noticeable, ways.
Teaching EFL it definitely helps to have this accent, in terms of getting work, that is.
Nah. I’m from NJ, and people here, and back in Atlanta, when I lived there, were always surprised.
Joe
When I speak English, not really. People seem to have a hard time figuring out where I’m from.
When I speak Japanese, well… they may not know exactly where I’m from, but they certainly can tell I’m not a local.
I have no accent.
When I first moved from California to Oklahoma, I couldn’t understand anybody, because many people in my class talked weird. I knew grownups in movies sometimes talked like that. I didn’t think real people did, particularly children. There were people who actually said “Ain’t” and weren’t being ironic.
Every once in awhile, someone would tell me I sounded like a Californian, and that nearly made me cry I missed California so bad.
But I possess the ability to very quickly sound like the people I’m among. So much so that, after talking to my boss’s husband on the phone for half an hour (he’s a Brit) I then spoke on the phone, quite by accident, to a Brit who worked upstairs, who asked me how long I’d been over here, as opposed to over there.
No one speaks with an accent. Accents are something other people have.
I know Reality Chuck is kidding, but those of you seriously saying you don’t have an accent, yes you do!
My own accent is a hybrid of New Zealand and Australia with no particularly strong traits from either. Australians don’t normally pick my New Zealand heritage unless I say something with a short “i” such as “fish ‘n’ chips.” Even then, if I were to say the same thing to a NZer, they’d pick me as an Australian.
Scifisam2009, I was just reading Helen Forrester’s accounts of growing up in the 30s in Liverpool. She was from a relatively well-off background until her family fell on hard times, and she retained her RP accent. I found it really interesting that throughout her childhood, she could get people to take her more seriously when she spoke - shopkeepers who would have thrown her out, or schoolteachers who thought she was hopeless, sat up and took notice when this little street urchin spoke the Queen’s English! I just found it interesting, and thought of it when I read your post.
As for me, I’ve never really been pegged by my accent. I’m from southern Ontario, and our accents apparently resemble California accents quite closely. A roommate in a hostel once asked me if I was from Toronto, but she was from London, Ontario herself, was an actress who had trained in accents, and had cheated by seeing my MEC backpack. Other than that, I’ve been on the west coast for two years and no one has ever asked where I’m from or seemed to think I had a different accents. Ontarians are pretty darn common on the west coast, however.
A piano has a definite melodic, pleasing tone which sounds nothing like peeing behind a tree although they could both be considered tinkling.
I have no accent. Whenever you hear a generic American on TV or the movies who isn’t supposed to be from anywhere I talk the same way they do.
Does this accent even have a name? It isn’t “generic American”. Maybe west coast. But we west coasters don’t have an accent.
I don’t! People tend to think I’m from wherever I am.
Until I go to Mexico, that is. There, I have an accent.
Born and raised in the Las Vegas, NV area. Moved to the northwoods of Hickville, WI.
I always felt that I spoke with a generic American accent, along the lines of what one hears on TV, but up here people tell me I have a “southern” accent. Having been to the South many times and hearing the drastic difference between the various accents in the region and what one hears in Nevada, I have to respectfully disagree.
I’ve heard it referred to as “Mid-Atlantic television announcer.” I speak with the same accent.
My best accent story is about not hearing an accent, though. One day I called someone up at an Indonesian organization, and chatted away in Indonesian for a while, feeling very proud of myself because I understood perfectly everything my interlocutor was saying. (Usually I have to ask for people to repeat themselves or use simpler language once or twice during a conversation.)
About ten minutes into the conversation we exchanged names and it turned out we were two Americans chattering away, neither realizing that the other was non-Indonesian because to each of us, the American-influenced Indonesian sounded just right.
Maybe “general American”. If you or Hilarity N. Suze came to Australia you’d simply have an American accent.
We have a slight accent. It seems like it varies throughout the local region though, so maybe only a couple items on the list there will apply to an individual. People from the Portland area sound slightly different to my ears, but I probably couldn’t pick them out of a line up of folks with similar accents.
I never really thought of myself having an accent until I read about cot and caught in a linguistics class. I can barely perceive the vowel difference, and they sound different in my head when I read them, but I produce the words identically when spoken. I’d bet someone from another part of the country who studied language could pick me out as a Seattleite.
…That’s English, then, is it? 
When I turned it up and listened carefully I understood a bit better. Charming accent!
Mostly I have a mishmash of accents that flattens out into radio voice – I’m told every day that I “sound just like the computer, are you sure you’re a real person?” When I first came to Texas and started eighth grade, one girl asked if I was from England. :dubious:
When I speak slowly, as to a person who cannot hear or apparently hasn’t the sense God gave a goose, the Texan drawl wakes up. I tend to also start mimicking any accent I hear so I have to be somewhat conscious around the one British girl I know in case she thinks I’m trying to mock her.