That is patently incorrect.
An agreement by “most people” is still subjective.
Let’s expand this thought experiment out to include someone speaking a very clear and standard Indian English. They might wonder how it could be that someone from, say, Appalachia could not understand them on the phone. After all, they’re speaking quite clearly and without what they would consider an accent.
But in fact, they are speaking with an accent. We all are.
There is no neutral non-accented speech. It doesn’t exist. We tend to think of priveleged accents as non-accents, but that’s a cultural illusion.
In the case of Indian and American English, for example, it’s the difference in cadence more than anything else that trips us up.
When you’re looking at differences in speech patterns, the social status of one dialect over another is meaningless. Exposure is all that matters.
For instance, I’ve been a student of language since I was a kid. I remember when I was in my teens I worked in a store in the US, and a fellow from Wales came in and asked “Wes th’and supat?”
I doubt if anyone else in the store would have known what he was saying. But I recognized the UK accent and it took me only a second to decode that he was asking where we kept the hand soap.
On another occasion, a black woman came in and asked “Whe’bouda leeb-eye?” I knew immediately she was asking where we kept the Levi Garrett tobacco.
On the other hand, one day a black woman phoned my step father – who owned rental houses in a part of town that was very poor, and largely populated by black mill workers who had been there for generations – and I could not understand what she was trying to tell me. She had a very localized accent that even the black kids my age from that neighborhood didn’t use anymore, and I couldn’t decipher it.
So it actually makes no difference whether people in the UK consider a particular accent to be “clear” or “standard”. All that matters is whether or not the other party has experience with that accent, and that vocabulary.
