British Accent....

[RevolvingPivot]

Just watching the woman in the house across from....

I've seen it said on tv where people say British Accent or they are British.

Obviously Britain covers
Wales Welsh
England English
Northern Ireland Irish
Scotland Scottish

Or am I being thick???

@randomsabreuse

With American accents I can definitely tell they are different to each other but have a very limited grasp of "where" that accent would attach to beyond generic south, west, east. I can hear that two East coast accents are different to each other but not know to which state/city they belonged. Hence "American" .

Likewise in French I recognise Paris and Marseille (thanks to Taxi films) and could recognise that other accents are different to each other but not attach them to say Bordeaux, Toulouse, Grenoble, Lille or wherever...

I think this is common. Lots of people know there are different British accents but not really what they relate to.

That being said, some of being able to "hear" an accent or even a language accurately relates to exposure. We lose the ability to pick up on sounds that we don't hear as we grow up, and in some languages there are gradations that have significance that doesn't exist at all in another language.

It's nothing to do with people being stupid or ignorant, it's just how the brain works.

Plenty of people say "a foreign accent" even though there's obviously not one generic foreign accent!

It surprises me that some people expect people from all other countries to have in depth knowledge of the countries of the UK despite not returning the courtesy by devoting themselves to ensuring they themselves have an equally in depth knowledge of the accents, boarders, political tensions and complexities of all the other countries, regions and political and cultural groups in the world...

Really the UK isn't any more important to most people in the world than geopolitics of Africa or Eastern Europe or south and central America is to the average busy person with no personal connection to those places in the UK.