I can tell the ‘high class’ accent, because it’s intelligible. I can tell the Scottish brogue. But the others, I can’t tell one from the other, except they’re all hard to understand.
In America we have the non-accent (Midwestern, I guess). The Southern accent. Ebonics. New Yorkers and Bostonians - some of them - have a distinctive way of talking. But we’re not nearly as diverse, I don’t think.
Do Brits have a hard time with American accents?
How many British dialects are there?
LOL. Midwesterners give themselves away in about nine seconds. With a little practice you can tell which part of the Midwest they’re from.
The traditional “media use” American accent is Californian, not Midwestern. You’re underestimating how many American accents there are. There is no “Southern” accent, for one thing; Texans don’t sound the same as North Carolinans, who doesn’t sound the same as Arkansians. Minnesotans are very different from Nebraskans. Kentucky’s got a few itself. “Black” accents also differ by region; there’s no one “ebonics” sound.
I think most American accents are intelligible to the majority of British, due to the large exposure we have via Hollywood.
There’s hundreds of accents in the British Isles and accents/dialects can vary between neighbouring villages. For example, Blackrod is the village next to mine. Whereas “brew” (meaning hill) is pronounced as in “brew some tea” there, cross the border into Wigan and it’s pronounced “brow” (there’s lots of other small differences like that).
PS: the site linked to above is attempting to catalogue all British accents.
RickJay writes:
> The traditional “media use” American accent is Californian, not Midwestern.
> You’re underestimating how many American accents there are. There is
> no “Southern” accent, for one thing; Texans don’t sound the same as North
> Carolinans, who doesn’t sound the same as Arkansians. Minnesotans are very
> different from Nebraskans. Kentucky’s got a few itself. “Black” accents also
> differ by region; there’s no one “ebonics” sound.
Most linguists who are experts in American English accents say that the standard American accent is indeed Midwestern, although there’s some disagreement about this. Some say that the nearest thing to the standard American accent is spoken in an oval area running from eastern Nebraska to western Illinois. (I personally think it’s further east than that, in rural northwestern Ohio, but maybe that’s because I’m from there.) Some say that it’s closer to the Californian accent. I suspect that the standard American accent isn’t exactly spoken anywhere but is a composite.
Of course, in some sense, there’s a Southern accent. There are some likenesses in all the accents we call Southern. If you divide the accents more precisely though, you can get more accents. There’s no clear way to decide how precisely to divide up accents. Also, no linguist uses the term “Ebonics.” The term is either African-American Vernacular English or Black English. Again, how many such accents this constitutes depends on how precisely you break up the accents.
Yikes, where do we start?!
Well, probably here, with a great BBC resource with a huge spread of accents, differentiated not only by geography but by age, social background, and so on.
The Irish have a brogue; the Scots have a burr. 
Sorry; Scottish burr. Should probably know that, since I’m 1/8 Scots (Scottish?) myself.
There isn’t a single Scottish one but it’s really hard to judge how well outsiders can distinguish accents from where you personally grew up but to me Scotland has a wide range of accents. The main groups are roughly (I’m no linguist!):
Glasgow/West Central Scotland - think Billy Connolly when he was younger
Edinburgh/East Central Scotland - think Trainspotting
Aberdeen - this can be difficult for fellow Scots to understand. It has elements of a defunct language called Doric in it, apparently
Dundee - seems to eschew consonants altogether “a e’ i’ a’” translates as “I ate it all”
Dumfries and Galloway/Borders - can’t think of any examples unless you are into Rugby
Highlands and Islands - The nicest sounding English in the whole UK is spoken in and around Inverness - it has a slight sing-song quality. The further north and west you go the influence of Norn and Gaelic, respectively, increases.
There are also posh versions of all these accents, and of course variations from town to town within them.
The one that is furthest from the “regular” Scottish accent is Aberdonian, although I wouldn’t give much hope for an unaccustomed ear to quickly understand Dundonian or Glaswegian either.
Can we please get rid of this idea that people from (insert region here) speak without an accent? *Everybody *has an accent. Some accents may be less noticeable to you but that’s because you’ve grown up with them and don’t notice them until you hear people from elsewhere speaking differently. Of course, to those people, *you *have the accent. (End of rant.)
But this isn’t a single accent. As other posters have said, accents can be divided up almost infinitely. And they change with time. Listen to the upper class accents in any British film from the 1930’s or 1940’s - nobody speaks like that now, except possibly the Queen.
And the queen speaks with a different accent now to how she did fifty years ago.
How many class accents are there? Why is posh English easier to understand, for Americans, than the others?
Social class and accents are intertwined in a complex way, and you can’t distinguish a discreet number of accents purely defined by class. Also, to complicate things further: whether or not they know it, people tend to fluctuate between different accents, depending on circumstances. If I phoned you up, I’d have a fairly middle-class accent. I use a similar voice when teaching whole classes or groups. When I’m teaching one-to-one, I’m far more Suffolk. When with a group of friends, I tend to fluctuate between the two.
All I can say is that when I saw “The Commitments” it took me forever to figure out what “fook” meant. 
A me too post–but not that word.
The word that cornfuckled me was “shite”. I kept thinking of alternate spellings (remembering gaol/jail etc) before finally figuring out that the word was “shit”.
(I was imagining some odd like Welsh spelling with three 'L’s , two 'D’s and a silent Q)
Yes, yes. I know. England. Wales. Ireland. Northern Ireland. Scotland. All different.
Yes.
So no one yell at me.
Only slightly relevant, but Emma Thompson was on a talk show and said English actors learning to speak in generic American accents often hold their nose up (almost like they’re imitating a pig) until they begin to get the hang of it. (For the funniest available example of Emma in an American accent, go to the 2:25 for context/3:30 for punchline mark of this YouTube clip. (In this episode of Ellen Emma plays herself, sort of: she’s a lesbian and lush on the verge of coming out but reveals something that’s far more embarassing than her sex-life to Ellen.)
I once saw a comedy sketch along those lines. An “accent expert” was talking to some guy… “You’re from Detroit… east side… um… Smith street… I’d say… third house from the corner.”
The Queen’s accent has shifted hugely. These days she will “go home” whereas fifty years ago, she’d “gay hame”. Although, it’s not just the Queen - TV and radio announcers have also followed these shifting patterns.
Geraldine Doogue, an Australian TV and radio presenter, said how her first ever words on radio were back in the 60s, when British=good and she had to say the two words “concert hour” as “concert ah”. That would never happen these days.
Hadn’t seen that Ellen clip before, and it’s great (especially the last line). It’s interesting hearing the moments where the American accent falters, often on ‘y’know’ and similar at the beginnings of sentences, where her natural English pronunciation is present before she can hit the American one.
There is a difference. “fook” is merely what it sounded like when the actors/singers said “fuck”. But “shite” is a separate word from “shit”; they just happen to mean the same thing.
This seems like a good place to ask a question that’s been on my mind, although I realize it has no concrete answer: Why do some Brits not pronounce consonants in the middle of a word?
Rather than pronounce “little” as lit-tul or something similar, they say li-ul. “Mental” becomes me-ul or perhaps men-ul.
I can understand dropping sounds at the end of words, but it somehow strikes me as strange to do it in the middle of words, particularly on key sounds in short words. We’re not talking about slurring “worcestershire” into worster-sher.
What is that accent, anyway? When I hear Lily Allen say “me-ul” in a song, what does that say about her class, her location, etc.?
The origin (and continued place of habitation) of the “accentless” accent is around Ohio.
I can back up the wiki cite with the fact that this is also what I was taught in Linguistics classes as an undergraduate.
-FrL-