One of the things I wondered about before going abroad was how would people in the UK view my accent? I know personally that my southern accent isn't that strong, but to someone not from the US I wasn't sure how it would be perceived. After spending a few months here, and to my surprise, I never really had any problems with my accent. Despite this though I did find it really interesting the things my accent did cause. For starters, I quickly found out that your accent can quickly draw attention. It didn't happen all the time, but when other Americans that I was studying with and I would go out to eat, we have had several times where people would just walk up to us and try to either guess where we are from or ask what brings us to the UK. At first it was okay, but it quickly became the same questions almost every single week. I didn't have much of an issue with it, but some of female students I was with had much more attention over their accents. I remember one day I was walking into town to buy some supplies, and as I was talking with a friend, I hear this kid say as we walk by "I think that was an American." It made me chuckle, but it was so surprising by how easily you can stand out by just talking.
The United States has many regional accents depending on where you are from. However it surprised me to learn about how many regional accents there are here alone in the UK. I've learned most people thing of the queens English or something similar when referring to a British accent. There are so much more. The main regional accents in England vary from the North to the South. Near the south you have more of an Essex accent and it tends to sound more "posh" or fancy. Yet, as you pass into the midlands and up north that accent changes, for example a Scouse accent from Liverpool is very distinct. Then of course you have Scottish and Irish accents. This actually leads into another social aspect of life in England as they too have both a north and south divide like in the US, however it is flipped from us. with people in the South tending to live more in wealthier cities, while the midlands and north can be not as wealthy and more farm lands. As I've come to notice and was reading about before coming here, the further north and away from London you get, the more friendlier and social people seem to get.
Not only was it interesting for me to learn and see that the rest of the world is full of varying regional accents, but also dialects as well. I met some friends in my travels from Belgium and have been able to learn about the different regions and ways of speaking. For example, most people in Belgium can speak Dutch, German, and French depending on which region you grew up in, but if you grew up in the far west of Belgium, they have a Flanders or Flemish dialect and way of speaking that people from the east side of Belgium may not understand or know. I got to experience this first hand when hiking in Scotland as I ended up hiking with two people from the opposite side of Belgium. David was east Flanders and would say things in dutch sometimes that Judith from the west side of Belgium wouldn't always know or get certain words he would say. Even the slang here in the UK has taken me sometime to learn and catch up on.
All this is to say even though I traveled to an English speaking country, it is exciting to see and explore how different the language we speak can still be. (Still found it funny that I had to remember to change my Word documents to check for British English instead of USA English so I wouldn't loose points over spelling)