Which English accent is the hardest to understand for you?

From a Southern/Western point of view?

Some of the English dialects where the glottal stop is used.

For example, the daffy dame on Absolutely Fabulous who has a Lancashire accent. I don't understand a single word she says.

<<Definitely American English

It always sounds like they are talking with a hot potato or chewing gum in their mouth>>

If you're talking about General American English, I agree with you; I've always thought spoken GA sounds like the speaker has a mouthful of gum-- cloying to an extreme.

<<For example, the daffy dame on Absolutely Fabulous who has a Lancashire accent. I don't understand a single word she says.>>

Oh yeah, she's annoyingly difficult to follow. She sounds so choppy.

>>If you're talking about General American English, I agree with you; I've always thought spoken GA sounds like the speaker has a mouthful of gum-- cloying to an extreme.<<

What exactly do you mean by such, from an articulatory standpoint?

I'm a native speaker of Canadian English and have heard all of those accents you listed at one point or another. I've never had any problems with those accents themselves, it's only ever vocabulary differences that cause me to misunderstand.

One native accent you didn't list, which was mentioned in another post, is Indian English. I find it next to impossible to understand! Not only is the accent quite foreign (for me), but they also tend to use confusing sentence structures, like putting verbs at the end of clauses. To my ears, they might as well be speaking Hindi. :S

I talked to a guy from Scotland today here in Chicago.
His English was understandable but I honestly thought he was from Eastern Europe.

His 'R' pronunciation was like Russian people's R sound.
He said he's lived in the US for 7 years but he still has an accent which I'd thought Russian or Polish. lol

I'm trying to get my head round the fact that a Scottish accent can be mistaken for one from Eastern Europe! ha! Never mind - I suppose non familiarity can lead to confusion, but I reckon it is the sounding of the letter R that's to blame and we so like voicing our Rs in Scotland. I know a guy called Rory Reardon - I'd like to hear a Russian or a Pole call out his name!

<<I'm trying to get my head round the fact that a Scottish accent can be mistaken for one from Eastern Europe! ha! Never mind ->>

When I was in the Netherlands (long ago -- on a 9-week business trip), some folks there coundn't distinguish US and UK accents. Most people there assumed I was from the UK, even though I never once set foot in Britain, and have a pretty typical GAE accent. I guess at that time, there were fewer Americans than British working in the Netherlands.

I find the Singaporeans quite difficult to understand. Even if the "try" to speak proper English instead of Singlish.

<<What exactly do you mean by such, from an articulatory standpoint?>>

Well, Travis, I'll try to explain.

All the attention has been focused on how a Southern accent sounds to GA ears; some find it pleasant, but many do not.

No one ever asks a Southerner how a GA sounds to HIM. I can answer that question--it sounds unbearably cloying. A few like GA, but for the most part, GA is perceived as unpleasant. (Mass media is changing this.)

Many GA speakers, especially in the Midwest, dipthongize their vowels. The long-I sound has an E added (from the viewpoint of a Southerner), and you hear people say words like "by-ack" for "back" and "ee-and" for "and". The "e" sound shortened becomes a "y", so the sound dominates GA speech.

The "y" sound, by its very nature, is cloying. The analogy about the chewing gum fits.

>>Many GA speakers, especially in the Midwest, dipthongize their vowels. The long-I sound has an E added (from the viewpoint of a Southerner), and you hear people say words like "by-ack" for "back" and "ee-and" for "and". The "e" sound shortened becomes a "y", so the sound dominates GA speech.<<

That here really only applies to the TRAP vowel, as many to most people in everyday speech actually have monophthongized the FACE and GOAT vowels to [e] and [o] respectively (except for some younger people, who may have a fronted diphthongal GOAT vowel between [8}_^] or [9y_^]). As for the "y" sound you refer to, that is [1], which is quite common here but does not completely dominate vowel reduction (as there are many positions in which many vowels are still reduced to [@] rather than [1]).

Travis, it probably doesn't dominate GA, but it's PERCEIVED that way.

On a related note, remember our conversation about monophongization of certain vowels in NCVS, viz., the long o, et. al.? I noted that it sounded quite pleasant to me; I hypothosize that this effect is due to the German influence.

On the other side of the coin, the dipthongization of the long-a that Southerners do, seems universally perceived as unpleasant.

Dipthongization, in general, seems to be perceived as unpleasant on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line...

>>On a related note, remember our conversation about monophongization of certain vowels in NCVS, viz., the long o, et. al.? I noted that it sounded quite pleasant to me; I hypothosize that this effect is due to the German influence.<<

Such is not part of the NCVS, probably significantly predates the NCVS, and is often found in areas where the NCVS is quite weak. Such, though, is most likely due to outside substratum influence upon English dialects in the Midwest, and the strongest substratum in most of the Midwest is, yes, that of German. However, other substrata such as continental North Germanic and Polish substrata would probably have had a similar influence to that of the German substratum here.

I can understand accents from SA, Oz, NZ, Ireland, the US southern accent, and most of the accents in the UK clearly. The African American vernacular...too much slang for me to decipher the meaning of what's being said but the pronunciation is often pretty clear to my ears.

I can't tell the difference between a General American and a Canadian accent, they sound identical to me. They are usually clear enough, but a lot of the time the awkwardness of the accent is distracting, esp the drawn out vowel sounds, the odd (to me) pronunciation of certain words and the "R" sound which irritates me. I find it difficult sometimes to understand American accents because of the "chewing gum effect" somebody else mentioned. I also have trouble with Asian accents because they quite often only say the first part of a word e.g "wa" for "one, "fy" for "five", possibly because of certain sounds not existing in their original language.

<<Such is not part of the NCVS,>>

I see, Travis. Thanks.

From all this, we might deduce that dipthongization with any kind of "ee" or "y" sound is perceived by non-speakers of that dialect as a chewing-gum effect; three non-GA speakers have noted it already...

(Southerners have their own dipthongization problems!)