Accents

It just occurred to me that I have not properly discussed the accent situation, or at leat if I have, I don't remember it off-hand.

First of, let me say that I have not acquired an accent. On second thought, I do have an accent. And sometimes it is almost disturbingly strong. Occasionally, in particular when I have been wandering around the city center for a considerable amount of time without saying anything, I will finally open my mouth to talk to the cashier and I'm slightly taken aback by how I talk. Like, the sheer non-Britishness of the American accent is rather abundant at such times. Might I also add that I was surprised to find out that some of the non-native-English-speaking students in my class could not tell I was American until I explicitly mentioned it, so perhaps it's not as great of a difference as we may think.

Aside from myself, there are the accents of the locals. Most of the people I have come across have what are termed Southern accents, and they apparently vary somewhat in range of how 'posh' they are, with the most posh sounding like BBC News presenters, and the least posh sounding Cockney (not that I can really tell the difference). Sometimes to me it sounds like lecturers have different accents, but when I ask, it turns out they don't, and then one of the professors to me sounds pretty much the same, but apparently is 'obviously' from Manchester. Despite this relatively constant accent, I still cannot understand everything people say to me. This is not so much the case in class as at various retail establishments.

I still have not been able to decipher exactly what the English think of American accents, despite making a few attempts, but I have been asked how much truth there is in the plot-line from Love Actually where the English guy goes to Wisconsin.