Equally interesting are the times though that people do not "hear" my accent--they cannot hear my accent as different from another speaker of English. It is the same for me, I suppose, when I hear Spanish being spoken--I can understand it at a conversational level, but I do not "hear" the accents of different speakers ( usually) nor would I be able to place them geographically with Spain, Central or South America, etc. But an ear attuned to accents can pick up those differences, as with British regional accents, pinpointing you down to a specific village! ( or so I was told!)

That is so true... I worked with a French girl before (in a hotel) and asked her a question about 'the Welsh guys' who were staying in one of the rooms - and she didn't have a clue who I was talking about! A Welsh accent would stand out a mile to me, but she said that anyone who spoke English just sounded the same to her... be they Irish, English, Welsh etc.

I thought it was so odd... but of course at the same time I wouldn't be able to tell a Paris accent from a Nice accent whereas she probably would! Can't figure out why that is though... is it that you become more attuned to accents you have heard growing up? And I wonder how long you would have to live in another country before you started to pick up on those subtleties???

I think you start to hear the different accents when it is "necessary" in your involvement in that society/culture to be able to understand more defined differences--the longer I am in the UK, the more able I am to place the accents that I hear--while I could always hear the difference between Geordie and Home counties accents, I would not have been able to place where each was from. So I think that you start to hear the differences when they aid your navigation of the culture/society.

Incidentally, speaking of Geordie accents, I find the northern English accents the easiest to understand and the most pleasant to listen to!

http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/estuary/cockneyf.htm

This article is very interesting for all that I do not understand some of the pronounciation symbols--about how RP accents reflect some influences of cockney accents! And it has a bit in there as well about " the intrusive R"--that is the official name of what I was trying to describe, when an "R" sound is added when one word ends in a vowel and the next one starts in a vowel--and an "R" sound is put in between!

HAH! The INTRUSIVE R!! It almost sounds like something from a Johnny Depp Pirate film---arrrr!!!!

It's not easy for me to distingush American regional accents: I can just about tell a New Yorker from the rest of them, but that's it. And I cannot distinguish a Canadian from an American, which has led to embarrasment on occasion.