For example, the pronunciation of "pearl" in some variants of Scottish English can sound like the entirely unrelated word "petal" to an American.
In Received Pronunciation, there are four open back vowels, /æ ɑː ɒ ɔː/, but in General American there are only three, /æ ɑ ɔ/, and in most dialects of Canadian English only two, /æ ɒ/.
Two main sets of accents are spoken in the West Country, namely Cornish and West Country, spoken primarily in the counties of Devon, Somerset, Gloucestershire, Bristol, Dorset (not as common in Dorset), and Wiltshire (again, less common in eastern Wiltshire).
Other accents are those of In February 2019, the New York Times published a quiz that maps the geographical differences between British and Irish dialects.
Yorkshire is distinctive, having regional variants around Leeds, Bradford, Hull, Middlesbrough, Sheffield, and York.
Historic Lancashire, with regional variants in Bolton, Burnley, Blackburn, Manchester, Preston, Blackpool, Liverpool, and Wigan.
Many of the Lancashire accents may sound similar to outsiders, with the exception of Manchester and Wigan, where an older dialect has been maintained.
Before the 1840s, Liverpool's accent was similar to others in Lancashire, though with some distinct features due to the city's proximity to Wales.
The city's population of around 60,000 was swelled in the 1840s by the arrival of around 300,000 Irish refugees escaping the Great Famine, as Liverpool was England's main Atlantic port and a popular departure point for people leaving for a new life in the United States.
While many of the Irish refugees moved away, a vast number remained in Liverpool and permanently influenced the local accent.
Historically, the Dublin City and county area, parts of Wicklow and Louth, came under heavy exclusive influence from the first English settlements, known as The Pale.
Similar to the Cork accent but without the same intonation, Kerry puts even heavier emphasis on the "brrr" sound to the letter "R.", for example, the word "forty".
True to its Gaelic origins in a manner similar to parts of Connacht, "s" maintains the "shh" sound as in "shop" or "sheep".
Irish Travellers have a very distinct accent closely related to a rural Hiberno-English, particularly the English of south-eastern Ireland.
Geographical variations appear slight and are mainly confined to individual special local words.
One group of speakers holds a recognised place as "talking differently": The regions of Otago and especially Southland, both in the south of the South Island, harbour a "Celtic fringe" of people speaking with what is known as the "Southland burr" in which "R" is pronounced with a soft burr, particularly in words that rhyme with "nurse".
Some sections of the main urban areas of Auckland and Wellington show a stronger influence of Māori and Pacific island (e.g., Samoan) pronunciations and speech patterns than most of the country.
Home-language English speakers, Black, White, Indian, and Coloured, in South Africa have an accent that generally resembles British Received Pronunciation, modified with varying degrees of Germanic inflection due to Afrikaans.
Similarly, Afrikaners and Cape Coloureds, both descendants of mainly Dutch settlers, tend to pronounce English phonemes with a strong Afrikaans inflection.
[citation needed] South African accents vary between major cities, particularly Cape Town, Durban, and Johannesburg, and provinces (regions).
[18] Accent variation is observed within respective cities—for instance, Johannesburg, where the northern suburbs (Parkview, Parkwood, Parktown North, Saxonwold, etc.)
[19][20] In Zimbabwe, formerly Rhodesia, native English speakers, mainly the White and Coloured minority, have a similar speech pattern to that of South Africa.
Those with high degrees of Germanic inflection pronounce "Zimbabwe" as zim-bah-bwi, as opposed to the African pronunciation zeem-bah-bweh.
There are many languages spoken in South Asia like Nepali, Hindi, Punjabi, Rajasthani, Sindhi, Balochi, Pashto, Assamese, Bengali, Bhojpuri, Gujarati, Kannada, Kashmiri, Marathi, Odia, Maithili, Malayalam, Sinhala, Tamil, Telugu, Tulu, Urdu and many more, creating a variety of accents of English.
Accents originating in this part of the world tend to display several distinctive features, including: Philippine English employs a rhotic accent that originated from the time it was first introduced by Americans during the colonization period in an attempt to replace Spanish as the dominant political language.
[22] Apart from the frequent inability to pronounce certain fricatives (e.g., [f], [v], [θ], [ð], [z], [ʒ]), in reality, there is no single Philippine English accent.
The accent of English spoken in Hong Kong follows mainly British, with rather strong influence from Cantonese on the pronunciations of a few consonants and vowels, sentence grammar, and structure.
For example, an office worker may speak with less colloquialism and with a more British accent on the job than with friends or while out shopping.
The Singapore government recognises four official languages: English, Malay, Mandarin Chinese, and Tamil.
It has a very distinctive tone and sentence structure, which are both strongly influenced by Malay and the many varieties of Chinese spoken in the city.