[lurk2]

> Popularity and optimality are not the same thing.

Yes they are. If we lived in a world where Australia was a world superpower we might be having this conversation upside down and with r’s where there shouldn’t be any, but we don’t. Every student wants to learn to speak with an American accent because it has the highest level of intelligibility owing to exposure via cinema, music, expatriate communities, etc.

[dqv]

Then you're not describing mutual intelligibility:

> In linguistics, mutual intelligibility is a relationship between different but related language varieties in which speakers of the different varieties can readily understand each other without prior familiarity or special effort.

(emphasis mine) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_intelligibility