[mumblemumble]

The Arnold Schwarzenegger example has always struck me as an example of how unforgiving people can be about accent. His English accent - the one he uses in public; I've no idea how he speaks off camera - is phenomenal. The vowels aren't located quite where you'd expect for someone who speaks a well groomed American "cable TV news" accent, but it has everything necessary to be perfectly comprehensible to virtually any fluent North American English speaker. Which is a heck of an accomplishment for any non-native speaker. And yet people still consider him "marked", somehow.

Also, the very idea of "unaccented English" bothers me. In any language that has more than one regional or socioeconomic accent, that's a loaded concept.