Question for the Americans: Can you guys tell the difference between British accents at all? Irish is pretty distinct, and cockney - but Welsh, Scottish, Liverpudlian, Geordie (Newcastle) , Brummy (Brimingham) and Mancunian all sound pretty different too.
Yes and no. I used to go over the the UK all the time, about once a month for 5 or 6 years. My buddy in Hammersmith was teasing me one day when I asked about the accent of someone on telly. "You mean with all the time you spend over here you can't tell one accent from another?"
Well, I explained to him that I could discern every nuance of accent in the UK, but not being from there I had no idea which direction any of them were from. In other words, the problem wasn't that I couldn't hear (or even imitate) the speech patterns, merely that I had no clue where on the map to match each different sound I heard. That had never occurred to him.
He explained that "Northern" accents were often used in adverts because those people are generally perceived -- rightly or wrongly -- as more sincere and trustworthy, as I suppose a Midwestern accent is perceived in the US.
Now that I've researched it a bit more, I can actually pretty well distinguish and identify region-by-region, if not county-by-county, in England/Wales/Scotland/N Ireland.
Actress Amy Walker does a good job
showcasing 21 accents in 3 minutes. Ironically, the first time I watched the video, the one accent I thought she did poorly was Seattle, and I later learned she's a Seattle native!
My speech seems to unnerve some people, because they search in vain to pin down where my accent is from. Lots of people think I'm Canadian because I speak clearly; it's probably just because I grew up in a State Dept family and we lived in lots of places (US and overseas), and my siblings and I had to speak to many people whose first language was not English. I also learned to simply mimic everything I heard, so I slip into any US accent and also speak Spanish, German and French with only the accent of where I've lived. No one I meet overseas thinks I'm American. My younger brother, inexplicably, sounded like a San Fernando Valley dude until he was about 10, despite never having been west of the Ohio Valley.
(Secretly -- my "native" speech, which I rarely slip back into, is similar to Richmond ["Richmun"], Virginia, or Confederate aristocracy)