Wow.
Newfie isn’t the same as PEI, let alone Ontario sounding like BC. There’s not a raging difference like between Northern England and Southern California, but if you listen, you can hear definite differences.
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That map is far too simplified. Just about every town and city has it’s own accent. The part of Carlisle where I grew up even had a distinct accent to the rest of the city.
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Next time I’m at a cocktail party and I can’t place someone by their accent I’m not going to try to slip fish and chips into the small talk. I’m going ask them where they’re from.
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I spent some time in Australia and as I heard it the way to differentiate the Kiwi accent is that they say “cheps” when they mean “chips,” “fesh” when they mean “fish” and “sheep” when they mean “sex.” Ho ho ho.
Summary
It seems everyone loves a good sheep shagging joke.
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Before hitting play, I thought the biggest tell of North vs South England was possibly “Fuck” vs “Fook”, which is basically what they used, except they went for “cup” vs “coop” like a bunch of cowards. I feel oddly proud of myself for this.
Why wouldn’t you include Quebec accents?
There’s also (broadly) West Coast, Saskatchewan/Manitoban*, All the different First Nations, Toronto, Southwestern Ontario* in addition to the different Atlantic accents (Newfoundland and Nova Scotians aren’t speaking the same accent).
People (including Canadians) like to think of Canadian Standard English as a monolith but there are many distinctions and regional divisions of basic vocabulary.
People outside of the US South tend to think there’s only one “Southern Accent” but I don’t think people in Texas think they have the same accent as people from Tennessee or Louisiana. People tend to compare all of Canada to the US, instead of comparing Canadians to other Canadians.
Another issue is that all English accents are flattening globally, with New York accents that aren’t as New Yawk as they used to be, and this is happening to Canadian speech patterns too.
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The other big difference between north and south English, is the ‘a’ in words like grass and bath.
Down south (“darn saarff”) it’s pronounced with more of an ‘arr’ sound, so ‘grass’ sounds like “gr-arse”, whereas up north (“op norff”) its more like the ‘a’ in ‘pat’ or ‘sat’.
Except that I pronounce my A’s in the northern way, despite being a bloody southerner, and I really have no idea why.
The impressive thing about UK accents is not how many there are, but that even today (when accents are becoming homogenised) someone can have such a strong accent that people born fifty miles away will have trouble understanding them speak. My brother was speaking to someone from north of Birmingham the other day on the phone, and had to get his girlfriend in to translate.
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Interesting. I’m English and can identify English accents to a very fine degree but am completely hopeless when it comes to Welsh or Scottish accents. The various English accents sound incredibly diverse to my ears so I always wonder whether non-English people notice the difference or just hear “generic English”.
Also, I can’t believe no-one’s pointed out that that arrow is pointing at Wales, not Southern England.
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After I moved to the Northeast, I was kinda surprised that you can’t really buy alcohol in the grocery stores here. There might be one or two in the area that sell alcoholic beverages, but the vast majority do not. I mentioned it to someone, and they said, “just get it from the packie on the corner.” I said, “the Paki on the corner? Isn’t that a bit racist?” They were confused, to say the least.
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Should be their national motto.
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I can imagine this leading to problems when ordering cocktails at a bar, because as mixers they don’t taste the same.
I had trouble hearing the difference in the “traffic” vowel sound between NY and Philly. The giveaway for Philly for me is the long O sound. In NY, it’s just “oh”, but in Philly, it turns into like an “aoh” sound that is instantly recognizable.
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You remind me of an interesting discussion among my francophone friends when we compared Québécois, Créole, Cajun, et island accents. One of the group took a vacation in Canada, and was surprised to see French TV shows broadcast with French subtitles - in Quebec. She struggled with the accent, so the subtitles did help (even though she thought it was odd).
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It’s like Spain and Mexico, and mainland China and Hong Kong, and England and India and Jamaica and Canada and Hong Kong (again).
For a long time, dialects were treated as inferior mutants, but whether it’s London, Singapore or Montréal, it’s just people developing their own language spaces, trying to sound like the people around them.
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I know Bulls - I was there a couple of years ago (on my way back from the Tongariro Crossing).
I can see that a Manawatu accent plus Doncaster would confuse people
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As someone born, raised, and living in NC that is so it. This is considered a normal thing in any local restaurant:
Waitress: Can I get y’all some drinks?
Wife: Coke.
Waitress: I’m sorry sugar we only have Pepsi.
Wife: How about a Dr. Pepper then?
Waitress: Alright, and you?
Me: Sweet tea.
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If I didn’t watch a substantial amount of British/Australian/New Zealand tv/movies, unlike the average American, I figure I’d be pretty bad at identifying those accents, too. Because American media may be terrible about accurately (or at all) representing various US accents, but they’re even worse about non-American accents. Despite all the British/New Zealand/Australian actors working here, those parts are either played by Americans or by actual Brits/Aussies/Kiwis, but using weird, exaggerated accents to fulfill stereotypes.
It seems like the American idea of the “English accent” is something between Queen and Cockney (one, the other or both at the same time), because those are the two English accents presented. In the US, a lot of English accents aren’t recognized as even being British, and New Zealand and Australian accents are often confused for English accents, because Americans are more used to hearing really grotesque parodies of Antipodean accents than the real thing. Some Scottish accents aren’t recognized as being the English language (with Americans occasionally offending Scots by asking if they speak English). A good number of Irish/Northern Irish visitors to the US end up offended by eventually being asked if they are English. The Welsh accent… I’m not sure Americans would distinguish it from the English (or generally recognize that Wales isn’t England, for that matter).
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Laughably!
I was about to use your earlier post as an example: there isn’t even one ‘Cumbrian’ accent. 
For the benefit of others, the person in the video has a Cumberland (north/west Cumbria, nowadays) accent, which is very distinct from the Westmorland accent, south of the barrier of the main Lakeland Fells (and within cycling distance of this keyboard).
In my childhood district of North Wales, even individual villages had radically different accents - not minor nuances only detectable by locals - due to historical industries. Buckley once had brick manufacturers from Derbyshire, for example, and Rhosesmor had metal miners from Germany. Between them is the more expected rural (but Liverpool-influenced) Welsh. So that’s three accents within 8 km…
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Don’t forget the accents from the former parts of Lancashire and Yorkshire that are now part of Cumbria
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Will get you mocked mercilessly anywhere north of Cincinnati
In parts of the country, they call everything Coke, even root beer and Dr. Pepper. Asking for Pepsi will get you tossed out on your ear
Up here in the Frosty Northeast, even the waitresses don’t call you sugar or hon. It feels… weird… to say the least.
We don’t drink that here.
We also don’t drink that here.
We don’t drink unsweet tea either.
We’re not quite to the point where most people ask “how do you heat it up?” but I have heard that question asked often, mainly from British people.
