Comments by "Evan" (@MrEvanfriend) on "The British Accent Doesn't Exist...Nor the American Accent" video.

  1. You make valid points, but the big picture here is that virtually any English speaker - at least a native English speaker - can tell an American from a Briton. And with mass media, accents are becoming more generic. In the Marine Corps, I knew Utahns, Texans, and Floridians. Most of them spoke with a general non-regional American accent. Myself, I am a native of New York, but my mother is from Tennessee. To my own ear, my accent sounds very generic American. In the Corps, I found that some people thought I had a thick New York accent - which was occasionally mistaken for a Boston accent (I sound nothing like a Bostonian). When I left the Marines and moved back to New York, people thought I had a southern accent. In Pennsylvania, where I live now, nobody notices any particular accent of mine - though I plainly don't speak with the Pennsylvania accent where "home" is pronounced "h'yome" and "water" is pronounced "wudder". Nobody hearing me speak has ever thought I was anything but American, except for one German guy who I had a brief conversation in German with at a bar in Queens, NY, who thought I was German mostly because I had ordered a beer that apparently isn't well known outside of Bamberg. Certainly nobody has ever mistaken me for an Englishman.
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