Actually I read somewhere someplace that in going from East to West, for the most part, there are hardly any regional differences in Canadian accents with the possible exception of Atlantic Canada....(and of course naitive French speakers in Quebec)...

But I consider myself pretty good in picking up Canadian accents without the giveaway eh!

Example, Phizer, the drug company, is running a commercial with the CEO talking about all the wonderful things Phizer is doing for America you know the one where he says behind this door cancer etc. Guess what, there is no question in my mind this guy is Canadian...somewhere in the commercial is the word out and that is a dead dead giveaway.

Then a couple of weeks ago, we were watching the CBS show about the storm of the century hitting Chicago. In one of the first scenes, we saw the early teen age son of one of the main characters in the movie. The instant the kid opened his mouth, I turned ot my wife and said, the kid is Canadian...sure enough we checked the yahoo movie guide and sure enough the kid is indeed Canadian.

American accents are much more regionalized than most other countries...somebody from the south certainly sounds completely different from somebody from New York.

And not all Brits speak the English of the BBC.

Interesting further comment...I always found it interesting that most Dutch people I come in contact with speak English sort of with an American accent; while most Belgians speak English with a British accent...funny the way it works.

The English of the BBC went out in the 1960's. I suppose that I now speak with a BBC accent as the current voice of the BBC flagship news bulletin speaks in a broad Welsh accent just like I do!! (Huw Edwards).
The trend of the 1990's in the UK was to dumb down the accent and speak cockney (or mockney as it was called!) just like the British violinist Nigel Kennedy. When he was interviewed as a child he spoke with a plummy accent but now has a cockney one (isn't he from Birmingham?). Today, it's called Estuary English. The Brits no longer look down on regional accents either.
As for the original post, we kids of the 1970's were brought up on American accents through Starsky & Hutch, MASH, Cannon, Hawaii Five O, etc. plus all the films.
What I do find appaling is that horrible accent that Catherine Zeta Jones has adopted. When home in Swansea, she speaks with a broad Swansea accent (or should that be aaaaacent in Swaaaaansea?) but in public in the USA it's a horrific drawl. At least Anthony Hopkins, Richard Burton and Tom Jones kept their Welsh accents.

Apropos of an earlier comment, I beileve that most Americans didn't speak like Bette Davis and Katherine Hepburn in the old movies, any more than they do now - their clipped quasi-English accent derived from educated New England speech, then considered "standard". Social changes during and after WW2 caused "standard" American, as heard in newsreaders, to shift more towards the centre of the country.

There seems to be an element of an accent inferiority complex (vis a vis the English "Received Pronunciation", RP) in some American posters. As an Australian I can relate to this; until the 1960s we were so ashamed of our accent that newsreaders used a clipped quasi-BBC accent.

There are good reasons for this "cultural cringe". The early self-doubts of a colonial society, the fact that a braying upper-class English accent can be an intimidating thing (it's meant to be), and the undeniable fact that the way a top English actor can use the language is unbeatably clear and musical.

I think that must be what the OP is thinking about when he says that he loves "the British accent" - he's probably meaning Belfast or Newcastle.

But even upper-class English has changed in the last few decades. Listen to the virtual parody spoken by the Queen ("Australia" emerges as Awse-strellyah..") and then the late Princess of Wales ("Yah, well, I dunno, rilly...").

I agree that nobody can do an Australian accent. Even Meryl Streep in "Evil Angels" failed miserably.

To an Australian ear most Americans speak slowly, clearly, deliberately and yes, often loudly. I exempt a certain aged waitress in the west of Virginia (the problem was mutual). Mostly, I find "American" much easier to understand than most regional British accents. Having said that, I would like the cast of "Law and Order to slow down a bit.

Neil Oz: Re Bette Davis and Katherine Hepburn's accents.

Bette Davis, like Margaret Thatcher and Noel Coward, was linguistically unique.

Whether this was a deliberate act of self-invention I cannot say.

Certainly Noel C and The Milk Snatcher set out to transform themselves.

But K Hepburn's voice was NOT unique, though very distinctive.

(Cecil Beaton for some reason refers to her horrible cockney voice -- a counter-intuitive description, to say the least)

Once at our lake I lunched with a wonderful old lady called Senator Florence Byrd. She was a transplanted AMerican who mentioned she had been at Bryn Mawr one year behind KH and knew her a bit -- provided her impressions of KH in the late 20s.

Sen. Byrd (a former broadcaster) sounded JUST like K Hepburn!

What accent did Ronald Reagan have? He was midwestern-born and lived in California as an adult. I'm not sure how I'd characterize it. Or how about Jimmy Stewart?

As a native of SE England, I need subtitles when listening to Glaswegian speakers on TV !!
When I visit the States or Canada, I tend to adopt a trace of American pronunciation, if only to make myself understood more easily !!
Incidentally, when I was visiting Portland OR once, I got chatting to a teenager who, when I told him I was from England, asked if they spoke English over there!! And I swear to this day that he was perfectly serious !!

I have often questioned whether or not English is spoken in Britain. I often cannot understand some of the people. In Wales last summer I had no trouble, but some of those northern Brit accents are unintelligible.

As for the Southern accent, I bet darned few of you outside the south could tell a Tennessee mountain accent from Savannah and Charleston, or a south Alabama soft drawl from Texas.
I can spot a phony Southern accent by hearing about 4 words, like Atchafalaya, Tennessee, Cairo (Georgia)and syrup.

But I had a woman from Seattle once tell me she had no accent. I just about fell over laughing.

Yep, there is a major difference between Nova Scotia and Victoria, BC. And even between British Columbia and Alberta!
I find the accents around Calgary, Victoria, and Edmonton to be the easiest of all to understand.

I once infuriated some upper crust Englisher by asking him if he could repeat what he just said in English.
I did it with malice of forethought!!

I also find that many English snobs think that foreigners are deaf and that they can understand English if it is loudly spoken.

I was in a hotel in Basel, Switzerland once having breakfast. The waitress, a young lady about 18, spoke no English.
She was fluent in French and German, but English was not her forte. This English dame of the hoity toity set came in and plunked her ample bottom on the chair and demanded "Coffee". Well that is an international word and the waitress responded. The English lady said to her "It is a nice day isn't it?" The girl had no idea what the lady was saying. She just smiled nicely and kept pouring and serving. The pompous gal repeated here question several times. With the last iteration, she bellowed in a voice that could have been heard in Bern.

I finally had had about all of her I was going to take and said, "The young lady does not speak English. Would you like for me to translate for you?" The Englisher said, "Humpf. This is the last time I will stay in a hotel that caters to savages."

If I could have ordered for her scrambled eggs Cajun style I would have. I bet that a liberal dose of Bayou Butt Burner, Paul Prudhommes Pepper Sauce, or Opelousas Red Sauce would have popped her girdle. (or a mixture of all 3)
Her eyes were bulging as it was.
Unfortunately, those are not usually available in Switzerland.

bob_brown, I once drove from Asheville down into Charleston and noticed the difference in accents straight away - but that's as far as my ear could take me. Some people in New Orleans sounded to me as though they came from New York, so I gave up at that point.

It's a pity those sauces aren't sold in Australia - sound good to me, too good for the "lady" in question.

Ok, Let's play a game called "guess where I'm from"...
1 hour east of me, they say "I pahk my cah in hahvid yahd." and 3 hours south of me they say "fahgitabotit."

Obviously, your "neighbor" has a speech impediment. It's "fehgeddaboudit".

Newfoundland has the strongest accent. (They were not even part of Canada until the late 40s.) Sometimes I still cannot understand them, nor their curious dialect words. "Moy farchuns, gerl!" (My fortunes, girl!) etc

But Nova Scotia, IMO, has the most varied accents.

In this little province of 1 million -- measuring only about 250 miles from end to end -- the eastern Nova Scotians sound pretty much like Newfoundlanders and the ones from the western part -- which they call the South Shore for reasons lost on me -- sound like the theatrically Maine-ish locals of "Murder She Wrote".

As family records indicate my ancestors spoke Gaelic among themselves even into the 1860s, it would not be surprising that there is a lot of Scots pronunciation there. My grandmother, b. 1895- d.1996, persisted, despite her boarding-school training and our youthful derision, in pronouncing "food" to rhyme with "good".

Nice! Sorry to offend, if I did!

tedgale, thanks for confirming what I had suspected re Nova Scotia/Newfie accents. My eastern Nova Scotian father does sound rather similar to John Crosby (former Newfoundland MP).

Of course some people maintain that Mr. Crosbie's accent was "learned" when he entered politics -- his antecedents, as I'm sure you know, ere rather "grand".

He was my Minister 1991-1993 and he was one of the best: always courteous, civilized, very smart, riotously funny but a very hard worker -- he went home with about 6 inches of reading material every evening and had read it all by next morning. His public persona gave no clue of the man.

tedgale, I fear I had no clue about any of that related to John Crosbie. What I mostly remembered was the "Tequila Sheila" incident, which made me think he was perhaps alcoholic. Goes to show I shouldn't judge. (Sorry for any Americans who probably haven't an idea about this slightly obscure bit of recent Canadian history.)

tedgale, about John Crosbie and his accent. I had never given any thought to whether he consciously acquired it or not, but now that you mention it, I suspect you're right. I lived in St. John's from '77 to '81 and rented a flat for a couple of years on Kingsbridge Court. (I can't remember whether Kingsbridge was all one word or not.) George Crosbie, John's uncle, lived upstairs, and I had many hallway discussions with him. (He was always fulminating about our landlord and recounting some story about how the Crosbies had saved one of the landlord's ancestors from a mob.) His accent was very different indeed--far more subtle--and his vocabulary was nowhere near as colourful. As you point out, the family wasn't from "out around the bay," despite the way John Crosbie spoke.

Newfoundland speech is distinctive not only in accent, but also in vocabulary and sentence structure. I recollect a colleague telling me that he would join me in going somewhere, &quot;As soon as I dout my cigarette.&quot; Dout is a contraction of &quot;do out&quot; and is apparently very old English. Another colleague told me, &quot;I'm after losing twenty pounds.&quot; I think the &quot;I'm after&quot; phrase has Irish roots. There are countless more. For the keeners, here's the link for the <i>Dictionary of Newfoundland English</i>.

I live in Halifax now and I agree that we have many variations of accent across the province. Cape Bretoners do speak in a manner that is very close to the way Newfoundlanders speak, but I can usually hear the difference within a sentence or two. I find the accent from the South Shore to be the most distinctive in the province. I just bought a Christmas wreath from a young man from Queens County and his accent was very much in evidence.

WillTravel, back to John Crosbie and the &quot;Tequila Sheila&quot; incident. While I was never a fan of Sheila Copps, I must say that John Crosbie's phrase was unforgiveable.

Anselm

Ah, many a slip twixt brain and fingers ... here's the link: www.heritage.nf.ca/dictionary/

Anselm

Canadian political references seem to have killed this thread. Pity.

Anselm: I'm heading on Sunday to Halifax, city of my ancestors (the Gale ones, anyway -- my mother was from Pictou County)

So I'll have a chance to check out the accents for myself, in the space between meetings.

tedgale ... how ironic! While you're on your way to Halifax, I'm flying to Ottawa on Sunday. It's my last appearance before I retire on December 29th.

Anselm

We can wave to each other somewhere over Rimouski.

All the best. Presumably, retirement will free you to travel -- and post -- more often!