[lordnacho]

Even accents from Britain itself can be weird. Ever spoken to a Scot, a Liverpudlian, or a Brummie?

Even people who've spoken English daily for decades will do a double take if they're not used to it.

If you listen carefully, the range of vowels is quite wide, for the same word in different accents. The probably throws off a lot of people.

[MandieD]

Even native speakers can have trouble understanding some British accents. Most of my family has lived in Texas for several generations and are monolingual English speakers, but one cousin was born in and has lived his whole life near Liverpool, and sounds a bit like it (omitting long story about immediate aftermath of WW2 and my feckless great uncle). His wife is from Cheshire and has a rather strong accent. I understand her just fine, but went to college on the East Coast, had professors and classmates of varied linguistic backgrounds, and have spent most of my adult life in Germany.

When they visited Texas for a family reunion, several of my cousins who have not spent much time around non-Texans honestly asked about the language she was speaking.

[ghaff]

For that matter, deep South and Cajun accents can be tough for a Northerner. I worked in New Orleans for a few years. A friend of mine from undergrad was also working there. He was from Jacksonville in northern Florida, so less deep South language-wise than other places. I remember telling him once I sometimes really had trouble understanding people. His response was that he did too.

[pipingdog]

Trying to check into a hotel in Glasgow with bad jet lag put me nearly in tears.

[vinay427]

More of a tangent as I agree with your point, but...

I think this diversity, while large, is still less than in many other languages. As one example of many, just within Europe there are accents/dialects of German in Switzerland that are largely mutually unintelligible even to some other Swiss German speakers, and nearly entirely unintelligible to most Germans. This is also true for dialects of Italian, or even Dutch, according to friends from those countries. It's generally even more fragmented outside of European languages.

Unlike English, some of these cases don't even have easily standardized registers. In my experience, people in Birmingham or Glasgow, for instance, can fluidly switch to a more standardized accent and dialect that's natively or "intuitively" understandable to a speaker from North America or South Africa.

[Asraelite]

I think the primary factor that causes this perception is the lack of any proper dialect continuum between English and another language. There are of course a few minor ones like English<->Scots and English<->Jamaican Patois, but nothing significant that any sizeable number of speakers would encounter.

Dialect continuums between languages are basically the norm around the world. You can even connect Sicilian to Portuguese for example.

I would assume the primary reason English isn't part of any major one is because Britain is an island, otherwise English would probably connect to Dutch and join the West Germanic continuum. It would then appear just as fractured as any other language.

[lordnacho]

This is a good point. When I was in Switzerland they had a guy from Muothathal on TV. TV decided to subtitle him. I thought Swiss German was weird, but this fellow seemed to be speaking a completely different language, to my beginner ear.

The thing is though, you can ask people to speak High German instead of mundart, eg at meetings. They admit it's different enough to warrant explicit statement.

You can't be telling your Liverpudlian or Brummie to speak the Queen's English, that would be rude.

[7952]

A few years ago I visited an office in Birmingham which is less than 100 miles. Someone was trying to tell me a password and I had to get them to write it down after several failed attempts. The basic sound of some of the letters was just completely different. I also have a strong accent which can be much harder to understand than a none native speaker.

[brandmeyer]

NATO phonetics (Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, etc) helps with this. The words were chosen specifically to be resistant to accent differences.