What Completely Insignificant Things Have I Done Today?

[Griffin NoName]

I have a habit of picking up the accent of the person I am speaking to. It's automatic and I find it hard to stop and talk in my normal accent. I am always terrified the other person will notice and think I am being patronising (patronising because my normal accent is middle-posh London, so it's sort of like talking down). It's like my empathy gland goes into overdrive.

[Sibling Zono (anon1mat0)]

I have a funky mixture of accents, I learned English watching an old (70s?) series (I believe it was from the BBC), plus the occasional traveler from the US, Canada or Europe that came home. Later my French Horn teacher (who is American) did her lessons in English and after I worked for BP where I had to deal with English and Scots. By the time I got to Miami (where you can hear a heavy accented English from Cubans and other Hispanics) I spoke more with a brit accent, that now has been softened to American (although I imagine that not enough to fool anybody).

In Spanish, apart from a few Colombian accents, I can do a pretty close Mexico DF accent, a close porteño (Buenos Aires), one of the Cuban accents (the one harder to understand) and to a degree, a generic Chilean accent and Castillian (I can mock Andaluz more than actually do it). 

Subtle accents and subtle differences are harder for me to do (ie: I can do Scot but I don't know how to do Irish, or have trouble doing a credible cockney or Australian), I would have to spend enough time with someone from the Indian subcontinent to be able to do that accent, same thing with the Caraqueño accent (note: not all Venezuelans have the same accent).

Funnily enough, a French teacher I had said that I had an specific French accent (I imagine Parisian but I have no clue), not that makes any difference considering that I'm not fully fluent in French. In Italian I should have an Hispanic accent because I'm more concerned with grammar than accent.