What is the world's most common accent?
by 
lady fuschia
ANSWERS: 3
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I guess that would have to be one of the Chinese dialects since it probably has the most speakers. "Accent" is determined by how you learned to pronounce words, so the most common one would simply be the largest number of people who learned to pronounce things approximately the same way. You can speak French with (or without) a French accent, so I imagine there are hundreds of millions of Chinese who speak with a Mandarin or Cantonese accent. I am also pretty sure that among native speakers of Cantonese (and most every other language) they recognize several regional accents of their own... but I don't think that invalidates my deduced answer to the question.
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This is a guess... but you could say Hollywood English is the most common accent -- as hollywood movies often use a common learned broadcasting accent, that is heard throughout the world thanks to movie houses and television. That accent is not so different from the accent spoken in large urban centers of California -- perhaps 10 million speakers in all with this as their "native accent". Chinese "accents" have as many distinctions as any other language... there is also a lot of migration between regions. While a billion people speak Mandarin I doubt there are any urban clusters where 10 million people sound mostly the same speaking in their native accent.
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An accent is only what another person perceives. I may think i don't have an accent at all, and the Britian exchange student has a HUGE accent. But from their prospective, they aren't the ones with the accent, I am. Its all perception, absolutely. In fact if you think of it that way, every single person on the planet has an accent. and none of them are exactly alike. Every single person speaks a little different, has a lot to do with their voice. vocal chords. everyone has a different clarity, a different tone. they may speak the same language as someone with a completely different depth on certain words. there essentially is no most common accent.
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