S'wonderful! Accents! British or French or Italian or Southern. They can tell you to "go to he**" and you wouldn't mind so much. Right?

I've sometimes wondered where the general American accent came from, and when it really started.

I am not convinced by the realism of strong modern US accents in films etc set in the "Wild West" era and before, or in readings of early American literature and historical papers on the radio, because most of the population then were either direct immigrants or of no more than a generation or two from their family's original countries.   

I suppose it must be an amalgam of various British, Irish and European accents that relative isolation modified into something of its own only over the years. Once a community of settlers had arrived and started raising their own families most would have stayed fairly local to the original settlement. This was common generally then, in the Old World as much as, presumably, as the New.

This local linguistic identity can be surprisingly strong even in compact countries with plentiful roads and railways and a largely mono-racial, mono-national population. A friend from the West Midlands of England told me that only a couple of generations or so ago, a native of Birmingham would have struggled to understood the dialect and accent of a Dudley or Walsall resident, yet these three towns (all now subsumed into a metropolis) are no more than a few miles apart! Go 20 or 30 miles from Birmingham to Derby and the accent is noticeably different again. So scatter groups of polyglot settlers across a vast continent and it's easy to see each group would gain a more or less uniform dialect and accent; but less easy to see a largely similar dialect and accent developing across the continent until the whole population and their transport links were enough to allow plentiful exchange naturally.  

I have heard Irish speakers on the radio, and some of them sound nearly American.  Similarly with English-speaking Dutch, and of course Holland was strongly represented among the original settlers. So that may explain the basis of the American voice, also influenced by British, French and Spanish - the last language giving the "new" country many geographical terms among the original residents' specific names for rivers etc.

 Although if you listen to almost any non-native English speaker now many have a blend of native and US accent, thanks largely to US films and TV programmes. I'd not realised this until an acquaintance who is English and teaches English in Sweden pointed it out. Many tend too, to use US rather than UK spellings; also due largely to commercial influences and sources. Even ironically if in countries that officially despise the USA!

I wonder if the English accents - of which there are very many - developed in a similar way? The British Isles were invaded or settled for hundreds of years from all over the place long before becoming anything like Britain as a nation. 

Britain is a small country but it has a wide variety of accents within it. The USA on the other hand is a vast country and I don't know every regional accent there, although I can tell a Southern accent when I hear one. I don't mind general American accents, I have got used to them after watching hundreds of American movies over the years, although I haven't seen "Fargo" (I've heard of it but I haven't seen it). Happy Friday, Rosie!:)

I love the various accents and inflections of the south. I'm a southerner and one thing I've noticed is the great variety of slang, word meanings and pronunciations that are prevalent from area to area. Language literally depends on where you happen to be standing at the time. It was said that American and the British peoples were two cultures divided by a common language and it's true. It is also true in the American South. You don't have to travel far to see the differences. Growing up in Georgia, I always found the speech patterns of friends in northern Alabama to be interesting. They especially got a kick out of my speaking French with my own distinct southern twang. Those old enough to recall the British invasion of the 1960's know that the acts that deluged the American music scene had learned to play and sing listening to rock and roll, rockabilly and country music made in the south. The result was speaking with a British accent and singing with a southern accent. Those of us in the south could only understand them while they sang. 

You had problems with understanding British accents in the Southern states of the USA? So do we English sometimes, when confronted with broad Geordie (from the Newcastle, NE England, area) and some other British dialects unfamiliar personally!

Many of the top-name British groups then were either Londoners or Northern English - especially Liverpool. The accents are very different, and not all tried to sing with an attempted American accent. I've wondered sometimes if those who did, sounded as fake to Americans, as Dick van Dyke's pseudo-Cockney in the children's-story film Mary Poppins was to British ears. (He played a chimney-sweep, a character not even in the original novel.)

The Beatles kept their Liverpudlian accents, as did singers like Cilla Black. 

True Cockney is very specific to an area of East London; traditionally within earshot of Bow [Church] Bells. Accents do vary across London but you'd probably have to be a member of a London-native family to notice the more subtle differences. I couldn't, having always lived over 100 miles from London. There was a fad some years ago to adopt a fake Essex / East-End accent called "Estuary English", a coarse "Mockney" which is as false and pretentious as the worst "Received Pronunciation" version of the "posh" Home Counties voice from leafy-suburbia West of the city. The art critic Brian Sewell personifies this almost to self-parody. (Essex is the county to Greater London's immediate North-East, on the North bank of the Thames Estuary.)

My own accent puzzles people sometimes. I'm a Southerner, having always lived on the English Channel coast, but inherited from my parents Midland / Northern English basics which have strengthened somewhat through contact with friends "Oop North" - to whom I sound all Southern. I remember one day Our Mam (that's a dialect example!) and I being very amused by eavesdropping on my Southern-born younger sister and her equally-Southern friend when they were aged only about 5 or 6. They were playing in a sand-pit, and arguing over how to pronounce "sand castle".
"Carstle", [long, soft 'ah' sound] the friend insisted.
"No - it's 'Castle'", [short, hard 'a' as in 'lack'] according to our sister, with the same parental linguistic traits as mine.  

One day I listened to two friends from NW England debating how to pronounce the name of a town spelt COLNE, in the county of Lancashire. "Colne", insisted one: hard 'o', 'l' sounded, 'n' noticeable, silent 'e' - . "No, it's Cone" replied t'other [as in ice-cream 'cone' but slightly sibilantly; and the true 'o' sound defies text-editors.] Eventually I said, "If you two Lancashire Lasses can't decide how to say your own place-names, what hope is there for a Southerner like me from 300 miles away to get it right?".  

Wonderful things, accents and dialects, and it will be very sad if they all disappear through an increasingly homogenised, uniform, "international" society.