ow! right in the accent!

I mean, how do you "average out" accents?

The names translate as Glaswegian (from Glasgow) and Edinburgh.Reekie means smokey, the city used to have a serious smog problem.

Nah, the San Jose local accent is distinctive and it's not on any national news.

The newscaster accent from the '80s was a real thing but it was upper-midwest. Tom Brokaw is the canonical example.

Go tell that to any linguist and get laughed at.

Yeah that's a midlands accent. It sounds hard to place, but you can tell where it isn't. It's not a Philadelphian, or a new Yorker, or anywhere on the east coast really (so many accents over there). Definitely not Californian or southern. So really it just sounds like the midwest (not Minnesota) or like it might be Pacific Northwest. The big thing though is it's easy to understand. Boston or Baltimore for example would be terrible accents to make the default for newscasters.

Really it's like how the BBC has an accent

Their point is equally pedantic.

Oh yeah - as I said, I lived in Britain for over a decade and I totally get how one can hear people who have no familiarity with Britain talking about the "British accent" and mentaly comment "you have no clue what's you're talking about".

It's just because I actually like learning languages, can notice accents in various languages and have thought about it, that I came up with an intellectual explanation of why that would be and that's what I put forward (well, only part of the explanation, the whole thing would end up talking about Eskimo familiarity with ice and snow and how they have far more words for variants of it in their laguage than everybody else).

I was thinking that somebody from an English speaking country has to be exceptionally ignorant to think there is a "British accent" - even I as a Portuguese and well before going to live in Britain recognized "Scottish" accents from "Irish" accents from "English" accents, if only because in films you generally hear actors make those 3 highly distinctive kinds of accent. If I remember it correctly I could even spot scouse and cockney accents as different, even though I had no idea were they came from, but I'm thinking that I myself as a Portuguese can't really tell any of the Brasilian accents apart and it all sounds like a "Brasilian" accent to me, so maybe there's more it it than that - I could long tell apart multiple accents from Britain in a language that's not my native one but can't tell apart Brasilian accents in my own native language, so mere "ignorance" doesn't seem a good explanation.

As an American I've seen enough brits speak to notice different accents, but I couldn't tell you where any of them go on a map. And I kinda have to stop and think to notice that there are different accents there because all of them just register as "English/Welsh" or "Scottish".

I have a similar experience with Canadian accents but I can usually tell Ontario apart. And I can kinda tell the difference between a kiwi and and aussie accent, but I gotta think about which it is and I definitely couldn't tell Western Australia from Sydney from Queensland