I speak a couple of languages with enough fluency to spot accents (including English, having lived in Britain for more than a decade) and in my experience even small countries have lots of distinct regional accents.
That which you describe is pretty much true everywhere with all languages - people from abroad who don’t speak the language can’t really spot accents unless they’re at the fluency level of speaking that language and even those from countries were the same language is spoken can’t really tell apart most of the accents in that different country beyond rough categories (so for the British Isles that would be “English” accent, “Scottish” accent and “Irish” accent).
That makes sense. However, as we’re exposed to American media arguably as much as our own—and it’s the same language—my contention is that I can easily hear extremely distinct differences between, say, Birmingham, Glasgow, Newcastle, Liverpool, and Cornwall, so just calling it a “British accent” and attaching connotations of pretension and upper class to it makes no sense in my mind. For example, does the character Daphne in Frasier sound the same to an American as James Bond? Does Harry Potter’s accent sound the same as Tommy Shelby’s? To me absolutely not, but perhaps it is because im more attuned through living here.
I speak a couple of languages with enough fluency to spot accents (including English, having lived in Britain for more than a decade) and in my experience even small countries have lots of distinct regional accents.
That which you describe is pretty much true everywhere with all languages - people from abroad who don’t speak the language can’t really spot accents unless they’re at the fluency level of speaking that language and even those from countries were the same language is spoken can’t really tell apart most of the accents in that different country beyond rough categories (so for the British Isles that would be “English” accent, “Scottish” accent and “Irish” accent).
That makes sense. However, as we’re exposed to American media arguably as much as our own—and it’s the same language—my contention is that I can easily hear extremely distinct differences between, say, Birmingham, Glasgow, Newcastle, Liverpool, and Cornwall, so just calling it a “British accent” and attaching connotations of pretension and upper class to it makes no sense in my mind. For example, does the character Daphne in Frasier sound the same to an American as James Bond? Does Harry Potter’s accent sound the same as Tommy Shelby’s? To me absolutely not, but perhaps it is because im more attuned through living here.