I had an interesting experience that shows the lingual egocentricity of Americans. In the early 80’s, I worked with a guy from Israel. He kept hearing people remark on other people who “spoke with an accent” and he couldn’t figure out what the heck they meant since *everybody * speaks with an accent. He finally figured out that they meant a *foreign * accent.
Yes, hereabouts the first two are the same but not the third. I do say “pen,” “pin,” “peeing”, and the first part of “piano” the same. Also “jewelry” and “jury,” and “towel” and “tile” - which really does matter when you’re doing a bathroom remodel, and “whore” and “horror”.
Didn’t we already have that fight? It was called Antietam. 
Wow. I pronounce all of those differently, except for ‘peeing’ and the first part of ‘piano’. I wonder whether you distinguish things that I pronounce the same. Maybe it’s time for another Vocal Samples Thread. 
Yes, and wasn’t it the bloodiest battle of the Civil War? Do you really want to see that again?
Family honor is at stake! My g-g-grandfather was killed there! He shall be avenged! Maryland shall be Southern!
With absolutely no flaws? Whatevah do y’all wawk upon?
I know some wonderful Kentucky mountain people, and to them, all three words are different; flair, flahr, and flaw.
That’s exactly how my sister-in-law from West Virginia says them!
What are dealing girls?
For that matter, what is bogue? Some Googling tells me that “bogue” is a slang word for a cigarette, but I’m not sure if that’s what meant in this case. Growing up about ninety miles south of Ann Arbor, I used the word “pop” for soft drinks, but I never heard of “dealing girls” (whatever that means) or “bogue.” All this tells us is that the U.S. can be broken up into thousands of tiny dialect areas if you want to distinguish them by every nitpicky little difference of slang terms.
Absolutely. And just to add, I can easily distinguish speakers from at least three areas in Georgia. And don’t forget Mississippi–their accent makes my Georgia accent seem harsh. It’s quite soothing.
So what is an accent called if you pronounce every word exactly as a dictionary gives pronunciation? Sure, you’d be able to distinguish America from England, but I assume the dictionaries are written differently as well. The midwest is supposed to have a very neutral accent, but I’m sure they deviate a little from dictionary English. Is it said that you have a neutral accent? A dictionary one? Standard American?
Good dictionaries generally offer a handful of the most popular competing pronunciations. Most of us pronounce every word exactly as the dictionary says.
Also, dictionaries specify pronunciations at a level that is agnostic with respect to a great many kinds of accent features (many, though, of a sort that my questionnaire from before wouldn’t test for, either); for example, dictionaries will tell you that “fly”, “ride”, “hive”, etc., all have the same vowel, but they won’t tell you whether that vowel is a monophthong or diphthong (much less the precise parameters of its articulation). Which would be the accent-less realization of that vowel?
(Well, of course, neither; accent-less is meaningless.)
Huh, I guess I was under the impression that there was a specific way to pronounce the vowels listed in the pronunciation guide. Though it makes sense that there would only be a standard based on region.
But it still seems to me that there has to be some “standard form” of English, and whatever deviates from that is a dialect. Like if someone says lahk for like or shore for sure, people will say he has some southern accent. If you say that you pahked yoah cah, then you have a Boston accent. There is certainly some variation, like how for me Mary and marry are homonyms, but someone who pronounces them differently I don’t think is from a specific region. But it seems to me that there is a way that you can pronounce the word sure, for example, where no one would be able to say that you have an X accent (other than American).
Maybe it is just by majority at this point, because maybe (I’m a bit too young for TV to not have been prevalent) before news anchors became a standard in the American home, maybe the “lack of accent” I’m thinking of was distinguishable as the flat, midwestern accent.
Maybe that’s what’s caused regions that have many people who don’t fit into the regional accent. I grew up in New England, but I don’t say sawr for saw, and neither did any of my friends or anyone I knew. But sawr is still a New England accent.
On a (hopefully) related note, I am a resident of western Maryland, and my sister, who claims the same, can imitate a perfect Cockney accent, which has been successfully corroborated by her encounters whilst traveling. My mother, on the other hand, attempts a Jamaican accent which always ends up decidedly Irish. My guess is that some people are able to better pick up the nuances of certain accents better than others, and thus we arrive at the OP.
I’m currently in college park, and it is a mixing bowl of accents. Frederick still definitely has accents aplenty, although it’s not nearly so diverse as CP.
Do it! Please?
There’s a map here that tells where the people “without an accent” live.
Notice that the caption on the map is unintentionally ironic. I thought about changing it, but that would ruin the joke. 
-FrL-
Such matters are extensively studied and it is well known which regions of the U.S. (and, for that matter, the world) merge “Mary”, “merry”, and “marry” in which ways, among other things. It’s true that more than one place in the country/world merges all three and more than one place distinguishes all three and so on, but that’s because there are lots of places in the country/world; it doesn’t make the feature any less region-correlated.
To put things another way: if having accent feature X gives information about one’s region, then lacking accent feature X also gives information about one’s region, for reasons which should be fairly obvious. It’s not as though the one can be called regionally-correlated, and the other accent-freely not.
Well, a single utterance of a single word perhaps doesn’t give that much information (though there can be a fair amount to be gleamed from it… rhoticity, vowel quality, and so on). Give an extended speech, though, and a linguist trained in such matters should be able to gain a fairly good idea of which regions of the country influenced your accent, no matter where you’re from.
(Also, why should “American”, as a broad description of manner-of-speech, somehow be taken as accentless or accent-neutral, while “Southern”, as a broad description of accent, should not?)
I’m not sure what the specific contours of the “lack of accent” you’re thinking of are, so I couldn’t say. (Also, “flat” as a descriptor of an accent does not seem to indicate anything much, except perhaps the kind of subjective emotional impression it leaves upon or is associated with to the describer.). Probably, what you think of as “lack of accent” is a fairly large swath of different ways of speaking, running through your native accent and various other similar ones you are commonly exposed to. You may not be paying so much attention as to realize many of the people who you would lump together in the “lack of accent” category speak with markedly different accent features; for example, if you do not natively distinguish “Mary”, “merry”, and “marry”, you may find it difficult to hear such distinctions even in the speech of those who do. But, sure, it is plausible that within that perception-based swath of yours there are accents which relate to midwestern accents from the pre-television era which were once distinctively recognized as such.
Incidentally, this passage of yours brings to mind, in a roundabout way, a thought experiment that may be useful in seeing the silliness of the concept of “lack of an accent”: a century ago, no one in the world spoke in the same way, phonologically speaking, as anyone in the world does today. (Don’t believe me? I’m right, but you can push that “a century ago” to “150 years ago” or whatever till you hit the point where you believe me). Whatever the particular variety of speech which exists today which you consider accent-free, it is a very recent innovation. Does it not seem silly to suppose that there was a point very late in the history of mankind when accent-less speech was first discovered/invented? What do you suppose the reaction was of others who first heard it? “Wow, isn’t it odd that we’ve spent all these years, the entire history of the language, actually, speaking in outrageous accents, when suddenly we see how to speak naturally”? Perhaps this will demonstrate sufficiently well the silliness of the idea that there is such a thing as accent-less speech.
(Though perhaps you will instead just react as you did with the differences between U.S. and British speech; “Oh, sure, accent-less speech a hundred years ago means a different thing from accent-less speech today, just as accent-less speech in the U.S. means something different from accent-less speech in Britain”. But what is the value of the concept of accent-less speech if it is to vary so? If one is to use the concept in such a way, then it seems reasonable to take any manner of speaking as “accent-less”, when focusing on the people who speak that way. The concept becomes largely fruitless. The natural thing to do is to accept that all speech is equally accented and therefore no speech is objectively distinguished by its particular accent-less qualities).
It’s an element of some New England accents in some contexts. What you are indicating is simply that there are other New England accents, such as that of you and your peers, which lack (what I will assume to be) so-called “intrusive R”. It doesn’t mean you don’t fit into your regional accent; there is, of course, more than one accent in New England (a fairly large place, as such things go). If the way you and your friends spoke was, well, the way your peers from the same area generally spoke as well (which, hard money can be bet, it was), then, by definition, you spoke with the contemporary regional accent of your area.
Oh, dammit, I fucked up the quote tags in the middle. It’s piddling, but I guess I’d like to see it repaired; could a moderator remove the period from the [/.QUOTE] up there? (What’s the protocol on this? Is it reasonable to report the post to get it fixed?)