I’ve been in the US almost 6 years now, and people back in Australia generally comment on how little my accent has changed.
Hmm… I have a hard time believing people’s speech patterns change that much after reaching adulthood. I moved from Minnesota to North Carolina when I was 10, and lived there until 18, but only picked up a slight hint of an accent (I do say y’all). I can’t imagine ever really changing the way I speak now even if I permanently emigrated to the middle of the Outback. (the place, not the steakhouse. Though emigrating to the steakhouse doesn’t sound like such a bad idea…)
Oh BOLLOCKS! A Kiwi does a much more convincing Aussie accent then vice versa. The Aussie accent is much lazier…just drawl everything out to its nth degree! “giddaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay maaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaate. Iuuym from Austraaaaaaaaaaaaaalia”
As opposed to the “Hullo, I’m from Nuw Zillund” 
Oh dear I came here to make a point and went straight to insulting an Aussie…oops.
I’m an accent magnet. I find it really hard to not mimic an accent. We host foreign English language students. (The most recent student arrived 2 days ago from China. His name is Yu…I deserve scorn for the amount of times I have found you/Yu funny) I find myself picking up students accents without trying to. I can’t listen to an accent without trying to copy it.
You found someone in Edinburgh with a Scottish accent? Well done!
I regularly go to visit my friends at the University of Edinburgh, and it’s refreshing to go there because for once my accent isn’t in the minority.
It’s like a smaller, colder and friendlier London.
I sometimes talk on the phone with a friend from Kentucky and end up sounding just like her in about five minutes flat. I always feel awful about it, but she’s knows I’m not making fun of her.
I also tend to start sound Irish after enough alcohol, though I’ve never even been there.
I had a friend who moved from England when he was 18 to go to college and just wound up staying. His accent when he speaks normally is kind of a mix between the two. It is neither English nor American just kind of in-between. He can shift between the two and I’ve heard him do a convincing mid-Atlantic accent. When he drinks, he starts to sound more English.
During my year in Europe, someone told me I spoke French with a German accent. Someone else told me I spoke German with a French accent. 
I grew up in Ohio and live in Seattle. There are surely regional differences, but I think I must be close enough to the generic American “newscaster” accent that no one really notices. That, or half of Ohio is already living here. 
Hehe. Thought I’d get a rise outta you for that.
There is some possible basis for what I said though (but please don’t ask me to find a cite because I would have no idea where to start). I read a thing in the paper a couple of years ago where there was some linguistics expert dude type person who had a theory that the entire English-speaking world will one day be speaking with a Kiwi accent.
Basically, his theory is as follows: by the 1950s, all the former British colonies had developed their own accents, except for some reason, New Zealand. Kiwis in the '50s sounded pretty British. Almost overnight, it became no longer fashionable to sound British and be seen to want to be, well… colonial, but there was no Kiwi accent to fall back on, so you lot went for what you have today, which this guy claims is a kind of default setting for English speakers. It’s kind of the accent you have when you don’t have an accent, and with mass migration and communication, one day we’ll all be speaking like Kiwis. Possibly crap, but it’s an interesting theory, and I can’t help feeling there’s something in it.
I quite like the NZ accent, but I would never tell you that!
I was born and grew up in Australia but got my accent from my British grandmother (… it was an English accent but she was all sorts of proud at not having either English or Irish blood, just Welsh, Scots, and a bunch of euro-muttery.) Now I’m in Boston I swear my accent has just got more broad Australian. But it’s really transpacific and weird because it was never particularly Australian to start with. At least after being here five years it’s changed enough that people stopped telling me I was English, I guess.
Ha! I studied at the University of Edinburgh last summer and I completely agree with you. I was surprised at how international the city was. I met a girl from Minnesota who’d been living in Edinburgh for a year or so and she had the oddest accent - a Minnesota drawl coupled with Scottish intonation. It was very confusing.
As for myself, I used to have a hint of a Southern drawl (lived near Atlanta for most of my childhood), but after 10 years of living in Korea it’s completely disappeared. My accent is definitely American but other than that I think it’s pretty bland. Incidentally, I would kill for a British accent.
I have real problems with accents. I’m British Indian by way of background, my parents immigrated here in the 70s. When I’m talking normally, and not around Indians, I talk with a normal English accent (a bit RP and a bit Lancastrian from where I grew up). When I talk to Indians, be it my parents, family friends, even work colleagues, I “slip” into an Indian English accent. When I was in India last summer, I ended up speaking with an Indian English accent, to the extent that most people thought that I was a native Indian astronomer. Likewise, when I was in Germany, most people would not believe that I was British, and assumed that I was from Germany, most likely Cologne.
Slightly OT, I have a close British Indian friend who once told me she was in a Pakistani shop in Ilford, and an Indian customer actually seriously said, “OH GOODNESS GRACIOUS ME!”
She said she had to leave the shop to have a good laugh. It’s good to see the stereotypes working sometimes.
Nope. Studied in Perth in 1999 for 6 months and didn’t pick up a trace of an Australian accent, tho’ I’m better at mimicking it now. I grew up in the upper Midwest and I do have a touch of the “aboots.” Otherwise my accent’s generic American newscaster.
It’s interesting - I can hear the difference between English accents (even if I can’t correctly identify their origin), but I didn’t hear any difference between the Australian and New Zealand accents. Fascinated my Aussie flatmates that I didn’t notice a difference. Perhaps if I heard the speakers side-by-side, as it were.
It rather sucks that American TV is everywhere. My flatmate was enamored with my friend’s pommy English accent (she was from Nottingham, also studing in Perth), but didn’t have much to say about mine. Always made me feel bad - “Hey! I’m a foreigner too! I’ve an accent!” Nope, just not novel enough. The only time it was noticed was when I stopped for lunch while travelling by myself. I was eating in a mostly-deserted diner, reading a book, when a family came in. Largely they took no notice of me until I spoke with my server and paid my check. Then they heard the accent and were all “ooh! Foreigner!”
It was fun to play with the natives, tho’. We had military recruiters on campus once, and they were asking students if they wouldn’t mind speaking with them. Most did mind, and just kept on heading to class. Knowing I couldn’t serve even if I wanted to, I said, “sure!” The recruiter asked me, “what are you studying?” “English,” I replied. He knew then I wasn’t Australian, but thanked me for being friendly. Funny, the Greenpeace people said the same thing in Brisbane - thanks, but we were trying to drum up local support.
I’m one of the mimics. I tend to pick up accents very quickly and find it very difficult to speak in my “normal” manner of speaking among natives. It’s a curse. It’s a gift. And it’s very annoying to my husband, who finds it embarrassing because folks tend to think I’m mocking them.
Apparently I pick up accents to varying degrees. In Russia I retained just enough of an accent to convince someone I was lying about my nationality, with rather hilarious results.