dianthus wrote:
I have a heavy Southern US accent. We tend to drawl everything with heavy emphasis on vowels, and extra vowel syllables added in. I can drop my accent to the point that people from other parts of the country can't tell where I'm from, but sometimes they can't quite understand me either, probably because my consonants aren't as crisp as they are used to hearing.
We have all kinds of offbeat ways of pronouncing things in the South so I feel like I'm in pretty good company here.
But it's interesting how different communities have their own dialect. Sometimes I meet people who have much heavier accents than I do and I can hardly understand a word they are saying. They sound very fluent in whatever it is they are speaking.
If you really want to have fun trying to follow someone speaking in English (in this case British English), try listening to Guy Martin. He's a motorcycle racer. Just search for him on youtube. In some interviews on the TT races, I could pick out maybe about one word out of five.
A physicist I used to know said that when he was an undergraduate, he had a prof who could identify quite precisely where one grew up by listening to them speak, often down to the individual county. He did have trouble when someone moved during the period at which one's accent develops.