As more of a story of external impressions, i'm from Seattle and I postdoc'ed in Germany and I got more than my share of the opinion on English from those who could speak English there (damn near 100% at a University). The first problem they had was placing my accent; they couldn't. Finally they concluded that i was some-sort of Canadian (which is pretty accurate). Then they did their own versions of U.S. accents. Almost universally these divided into New York and Texan. Their impression of the states, based on either vacationers or hollywood, confirmed their view that people from the U.S. were either loud with a Texas accent or loud with a New York accent. We decided that it was a natural sampling bias based on the overhearing of the loudness.
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