The fact that you ask this question tells me that you believe all accents are alike in degree. The fact that I used the terms “strong/thick” should tell you I don’t.
I still don’t understand
- How you can hand wave away country music and rap music.
- How you can’t hear the differences between SAE and pop music singing. How do you not hear the ee>ay and the elided Rs.
Any unfamiliar accent is going to be difficult to understand. SAE and RP have the advantage of being commonly used in mass media, so a large number of people have been exposed to them. But there’s nothing inherently easier to understand about these dialects than any other dialect of English.
The Scots hereabouts sometimes have to ask me to repeat myself, especially if I’m spelling a word for them. If I say “e” they seem to hear “a” or even “i” instead. Makes spelling my name frustrating. The trouble seems more pronounced in those with thicker accents. Most identify my accent as Canadian, and I do have a bit of a Manitoba thing going there, though if I spent any significant amount of time in the States people would tell me it I was sounding more American. Same thing with my daughter when she would come to Canada to visit me and then go home with an accent.
I don’t know what counts as “SAE”; I was born in Pennsylvania but I don’t sound like them as far as I can tell, spent time in the Carolinas and Connecticut before moving out west, and I didn’t pick up their accents either. I’m not sure how to describe a Washington State accent. It’s a bit more nasal than the Manitoba accent, that’s the main difference that I can tell.
I’ve never had much regional variation no matter where we lived, my mother always said I spoke like a radio announcer, but my sister picked up a southern accent when we lived in the Carolinas that still hasn’t left her decades later. That said, when a Canadian friend who’s lived in Birmingham for several years came up for the wedding, Parkhead said I sounded more Canadian while she was here. 
I’ve had several Scots tell me never to lose the Canadian accent, that it’s nice for a change. I think I’m picking up a case of the Transatlantic accent, or “irritable vowel syndrome”, though. 
This is not a matter of belief. No accent can be thick as an absolute characteristic. It can only be thick relative to other specifically identified accents.
I don’t.
I don’t see how this is true. There are basic sounds understood to belong to the English language, which are pronounced at varying extremes of difference, depending on where you are from, sometimes to the point of being barely recognizable as English at all.
I guess some people could claim to be speaking English and pronounce “dog” as “flibbertigibberty” and that would be no more or less accented than Brian Williams saying “dog”? If you buy that, great. I don’t. Some accents are plainly more extreme variations on English pronounciation than others, hence “thick”. I know, you disagree. Established.
Understood by whom? This is the point you are missing.
I would certainly prefer it if there was such a thing as standard English, and it would be fairly close to RP, but there isn’t.
See whet you’ve done? You have chosen a specific accent – Brian Williams’s accent – in order to measure whether another accent is thick or not. That’s what I’m talking about. An accent can be thick only when comparing it to other accents.
Well, but Brian Williams has a stronger accent than I do. I mean, I say “dog” and he says something like “dahg”, or maybe “dowg”. So his pronunciation is a more extreme variant than my accentless speech. In short, he sounds American and I sound normal.
Edit: Just to note for non-Americans, Brian Williams is an American newsreader/current affairs show host.
So you don’t agree that there is any kind of agreed sound to the English language and that, say, “dee-raw-gee-yo” would be a way of pronouncing the letters “d-o-g” strung together that is no more extreme or “strong” than any other?
If your answer is “yes”, we disagree. Which I think we already knew.
We don’t pronounce strings of letters. We pronounce words. They are written as strings of letters, but these are not necessarily a guide to pronunciation.
It’s like this: imagine that English is color wheel, and every color is some distinct dialect or accent. You personally speak “yellow”. So when you hear a “yellow-orange” accent or a “lime green” one, they sound pretty similar to yours. When you hear a “violet” accent, it’s all but unintelligible to you. But to someone who speaks a “magenta” accent, “violet” sounds very similar. It’s all relative. You can’t talk in any meaningful way about “extremes of difference” unless you pick a starting value to compare to. Otherwise, you’re basically saying “Turquoise is very noticeably different.” From what? Red? Navy? Aqua?
Now the thing is, most English-speaking people, regardless of what accent they speak, are going to be very familiar with your “yellow” accent, and a few other accents, not because they’re similar to their own accent, and not because those accents are some kind of “neutral” color, but because they hear them all the time, on TV, in the movies, in music, and so on. But even if they can understand these accents, they will still hear them as accents, and will consider them “strong” or “weak” depending on how different these accents are from their own.
This is not a matter of opinion; this is how language works.
No, they couldn’t, because that is not within the accepted range of “English” sounds for pronouncing those letters. But let’s say, just for fun, that it is. Then yes, they do not have a “stronger” or “more accented” pronunciation than any other English speaker. It’s perfectly acceptable for you to say, though, that they have a very strong accent to you.
ETA: Steophan is correct, we don’t pronounce letters. I only said that because I started to get into a discussion of lexemes and phonemes and so on, and realized it wasn’t worth it.
Define accepted range.
Accepted by whom? According to what rules?
Define “range” all by itself; what does it include? What does it define? Is there no center in that range? Is there no baseline? Because if there isn’t, what is the “range” being defined by and measured against? What is the top of the range? What is bottom? What are the north, south, east, west parts of the range? Do they change constantly? Then what does range mean?
Good luck with that.
It’s a very flexible and ill-defined range. That’s really the way all human language works. Language is not chemistry. Once you go too far out in the range, you’re speaking a different language, but there’s no bright line that tells you exactly when you’ve crossed over.
The range of those who speak English. If there was actually a substantial group of people who spoke English as their native tongue who pronounced dog as “dee-raw-gee-yo” then that would be part of the range.
The only meaningful definition of “strong” that you could apply here is “at greatest variance to the majority of other native English speakers”.
Stoid, let me ask you a question: is there any connection between your definition of “no accent” and “extent to which dipthongs are prevalent in the speech being analyzed”? Because it sounds to me like you believe that “fewer dipthongs = purer/less accented speech.” But I don’t want to put words in your mouth - what is your position on this?
History. English has its roots mostly in what we now consider Britain and because historically, certain parts of that land mass have been centers of power, politically, economically, and academically, people in other parts of the country found it best to emulate their speech patterns. If the only scribes you could get were in London in 1350, they were going to write down what you said using phonetic strings that they’re used to and those may differ strongly from what you’re used to. Dictionaries and grammars were made in those areas and they’re what influenced the formation of what you can call Standard English. Had a fluke of history changed this pathway, you could very well say one egg, two eyren nowadays. Anyway it’s all relative and if the American south had been a stronger political force and there had been fewer interactions with Europe, american english could have spelt dog d-a-w-g and any number of words a different way.
Define “far” in this context. (Hint: I’m thinking “strong” or “thick” would also do to define “far”. Hello.)
Sounds good to me!
I’d say no, within my limited understanding of dipthongs, because the first thing that pops into my head when I look at that question is the way the sound of an “r” can differ so much between accents, and unless the “r” sound is considered part of a dipthong (everything I know about dipthongs refers to vowel sounds) then no.
But I do not have enough education in the language of language to take any “position” from that perspective. My positions are entirely those of a layperson with a pretty good ear as well as a bit of a gift for doing accents.
Fascinating related fact I heard recently: the ability to sing has nothing to do with the way one’s vocal cords are designed. Being able to sing well is entirely a function of the brain, which surprised me. Until I thought about it and realized that the ability to accurately produce a tune (which I generally cannot do outside of a very narrow range) is probably similar to being able to accurately produce an accent (which is something I was able to do when I was very young, as young as 7 years old). Fascinatin’!
If a subset of English speakers called each of Pluto, Lassie, and Spuds McKenzie a “flibbertigibberty,” we wouldn’t consider it an alternate pronunciation of “dog”. That would simply be dialectal variance in vocabulary – akin to “elevator/lift”, “soda/pop/coke”, “knickers/panties”, “sofa/chesterfield”, etc.
There is, indeed, a “baseline”, although it is not a clear, bright-line kind of thing, as ascenray pointed out. And it definitely has no center, any more than the surface of a sphere has a center.
That centerless “baseline” is simple intelligibility: if I can use my native-English-speaker mental model to make out what that dude is saying, even if I have to work at it and ask for repetition … then that speaker’s idiolect is “in the accepted range”. He’s speaking English.
And if he’s been somehow shielded from mass media, and thus has never heard SAE, RP, or other widely-used English dialects? Then my accent will be as difficult for that dude as his is for me. Our accents will be same “thickness” to one another – that dude hears “thick accent”, I hear “thick accent”.
But if 20 more-or-less SAE speakers join in, then the 21 of us may be tempted to point to that dude and declare “That dude has a think accent! The rest of us speak unaccented English!”