[eldaisfish]

>The NA English accent is considered the most clear and easy to understand.

Do you have any evidence of this? I would believe that it depends strongly on the language(s) you already know. Perhaps you are confusing prevalence with clarity. North America has tremendous soft power - more so than any other part of the world and their accents are ubiquitous.

Clarity is not necessarily function of the accent.

[Zababa]

As a French, the Amerian accent is usually the easiest to understand. That's also what most people around me think, though they also think of the British accent as more "fancy". This is for the "American you hear on TV" accent. which is also the one that I hear the most on Youtube or sites like that.

You're right about clarity not being a function of accent, at least not totally. There are some people that speak terrible English with a French accent, and others that speak clear and easy to understand English with a French accent. The same applies to pretty much every accent. I also agree with you on the soft power, however part of the soft power will mean that people are more used to the NA accent.

As a final point, I've heard multiple times that sometimes people that speak English as a second language can understand each other really well while Americans have a really hard time understanding them. If that's a real phenomenon, then having a non-American accent could be detrimental if you want to work in the USA.

[ceilingcorner]

American media (movies, news, etc.) is universal. People all around the world watch American shows and movies and are accustomed to the accent. This output dwarfs any other versions of English. So, to begin with, people are just more familiar with American English.

Adding to that, I’m not confusing prevalence with clarity. The standard American accent is clearer and easier to understand than most other variants, including American subcultural accents like the Boston, Texan, or Southern accents.

[eldaisfish]

So you have no evidence of your claim.

>, I’m not confusing prevalence with clarity

...but you do that right here:

>American media (movies, news, etc.) is universal. People all around the world watch American shows and movies and are accustomed to the accent.

So it is prevalence and not clarity.

[ceilingcorner]

No, it is both, as I just said.

It is widespread common knowledge that the American accent is the easiest to understand. If you don’t agree with this, I’m sorry but you are not speaking from experience.

[notahacker]

Can you identify any intrinsic property of General American other than media, business and language school familiarity that makes it particularly intelligible? Its pronunciation is as divorced from phonetics as most English dialects, it elides some consonants and vowel clusters that are distinct in most other English variants and it tends to be spoken more rapidly than some English dialects.

And yes, I have considerable experience of speaking English abroad, and whether I think the listener will understand me better if I exaggerate my British diction, adopt more General American-sounding syllables, pick up quirks of pronunciation and phrasing used in the local ESL lingua franca or pronounce a particular problem word as it is written is entirely situational, and generally based on what the person I'm speaking to is most exposed to.

[zestyping]

> It is widespread common knowledge that the American accent is the easiest to understand.

I didn't know that this was established. I'd be curious to see a source for this — has it been studied?

[Grustaf]

American English is easier to understand because it's less distinctive, it has lost any character, which is common for linguæ francæ.

So I don't think it's solely about American soft power, although that will undoubtedly play a part.