It's just so interesting to hear that I have an immediately identifiable accent when I don't even think I have one, so weird. It feels like you have a competitive advantage that I cannot easily copy or get back at you with :)
Perhaps this is also how folks with "real" accents think too (that they can't hear it), but I gotta feel like they can recognize that they sound different from the "people on TV". My wife did however tell me that in a phone conversation with a US colleague that she immediately heard herself sound obviously Canadian after saying something, but I think it was more phrase based, a question followed by "eh?". "Ok, I definitely heard it that time" she immediately said.
I think Australians and so on they know. The Canadian accent, compared to standard American, is much more subtle, but even after living in Canada for 2 years I got so used to it that I wasn't thinking about it in daily conversation. However when I left and came back a year later on vacation it was back to being obvious.
Perhaps this is also how folks with "real" accents think too (that they can't hear it), but I gotta feel like they can recognize that they sound different from the "people on TV". My wife did however tell me that in a phone conversation with a US colleague that she immediately heard herself sound obviously Canadian after saying something, but I think it was more phrase based, a question followed by "eh?". "Ok, I definitely heard it that time" she immediately said.