Americans may say they love our accents (I have been accused of sounding 'like Princess Di') but the more thoughtful ones resent and rather dislike us as a nation and people, as friends of mine have found out by being on the edge of conversations where Americans assumed no Englishmen were listening.And it is the English, specifically, who are the targets of this. Few Americans have heard of Wales. All of them have heard of Ireland and many of them think they are Irish. Scotland gets a sort of free pass, especially since Braveheart re-established the Scots' anti-English credentials among the ignorant millions who get their history off the TV.

It's not my accent, but my brevity makes me stylish.

The sound of an English accent distracted her and lifted her spirits. She associated English accents with singing teapots, schools for witchcraft, and the science of deduction. This wasn't, she knew, terribly sophisticated of her, but she had no real guilt about it. She felt the English were themselves to blame for her feelings. They had spent a century relentlessly marketing their detectives and wizards and nannies, and they had to live with the results.

Some studies of successful language learners have suggested that they're more "open to new experiences" than the rest of us. Temptingly, psychologist Alexander Guiora proposed that we have a self that's bound up in our native language, a "language ego", which needs to be loose and more permeable to learn a new language. Those with more fluid ego boundaries, like children and people who have drunk some alcohol, are more willing to sound not like themselves, which means they have better accents in the new language.

Thousands of miles from Georgia, beginning that night in England, my dad became a foreign-language speaker to me – and I was utterly charmed by it. I found the foreigner in myself.

Yea, v-verily, she answered, understanding his thought though not his idiom and speaking without - she hoped - noticeable hesitation. "Methought I saw a serpent moving in the grass yonder, but now I see 'twas but the stirring of the breeze." She slid her hands under the paper bag in her lap to hide their trembling.Ana Vasilifata

I think we are wise, we English speakers, to savor accents. They teach us things about our own tongue.

The woman spoke with a heavy western North Carolina accent, which I used to discredit her authority. Here was a person for whom the word 'pen' had two syllables. He people undoubtedly drank from clay jugs and hollered for Paw when the vittles were ready-- so who was she to advise me on anything?

I’m nobody’s sidekick,” Annabeth growled. “And, Percy, his accent sounds familiar because he sounds like his mother. We killed her in New Jersey.”Percy frowned. “I’m pretty sure that accent isn’t New Jersey. Who’s his—? Oh.”It all fell into place. Aunty Em’s Garden Gnome Emporium—the lair of Medusa. She’d talked with that same accent, at least until Percy had cut off her

He had a voice you couldn't miss: strong and penetrating with strange vowels that sounded different from the accents of other English speakers even to me. I later discovered that he was Canadian.

My voice falls into Southern drawl when I am tired, drunk, or in trouble. Too often, my accent is attacked by all three of these realities.