Pulaski

It's "wadder", like "ledduce". ... Or you like JerseyGirl, who flatly refused to modify her English?

Those are two of several pronunciation variations I adopted very soon after I arrived; also "tomayto" (I adopted that one immediately), and "gah-rahj".

TexanScot

Well I'm not a USC but yes, there is a difference and you can tell, but it does take some practice.

I generally split southern accents into "Texas" and "Not Texas" first of all, and I can *usually* split the "Not Texas" bucket down to Louisiana, North Carolina and Tennessee. I'd probably struggle to pick out the other states or even regional differences in most of them, but you can certainly tell the difference once you've had enough exposure.

BritInParis

This appears to be a winning strategy for the OP.

robtuck

I know when I've gone full Thames Estuary/West Country on someone and can repeat, but my ability to pronounce in local ways tends to come across as a mickey take. Much better at word substitution now, to the point I used Gas Station when talking to a colleague form the UK office with nobody on the call from the USA. A fair chunk of my working life includes audiences across both countries so it is fun, and deciding which English to use when e-mailing creates just as much angst at times. I was a little crest fallen when finding out the Z is the original spelling of words we now use an S for in the UK though.

BEVS

I concur.

This took me a while to work out. Garridge !

Pulaski

Yeah, and that is the one that I most often forget to flip back when I cross the pond.
In my head, I think the same thing, but at least I am understood, and I am not aware that anyone has ever taken offence at an Englishman using US pronunciations in a vaguely-northern English accent.
Yes, I sometimes wrestle with that issue, though I now have little to do with my employer's UK operations, but usually I try to decide who is the primary target of my email. I think it confused my US colleagues when I used to go on group visits to the UK offices and I flipped 100% to local lingo. It also surprised some people who knew me only by email, to find that I am British, though I still get that in the US too, as we use email a lot more than the phone and so people may have worked with me for months, or even years, and not realized that I am British.
If you consult the Oxford English dictionary it actually recommends/ prefers the use of z over s for most -ise/ -ize words, though I think realise is still preferred with an s. And it isn't unusual for what we knows think of as Americansisms to actually be archaic English usage that the English moved on from but was retained in America, with "gotten" being a prime example.

Dorothy

With my Canadian accent (which is always mistaken for Irish) I get Josie or Rosie or my all time favourite, Derophy,

scrubbedexpat091

I can usually tell if someone is from Louisiana if they have a certain accent, otherwise the southern accents really don't sound different enough to me to be able to tell if someone is from Tennessee or Georgia or whatever state.

I am in Canada now, I can usually spot someone from Ontario from their accent which is different then the accent here in BC, accent in BC is closer to WA/OR then it is to Ontario. Newfoundland accent is unique so easy to spot, as is Quebec accent. Not sure about Nova Scotia or New Brunswick.

robtuck

On a return trip to the UK, I attempted to try out my new found ability to tell some America accents apart on a waitress. She played along as I wondered if she was from the Mid West, before finally putting me out of my misery and telling me she was Canadian. Can't even get the right country, let alone region or State! She got a good tip by UK standards and I sucked up the embarrassment.

HDWill

Some upper midwest accents (e.g. Wisconsin) are very similar to Canadian accents. Nearly identical in some cases I'd say.

Pulaski

The fact that young Canadians can get a "working holiday visa" for the UK, but Americans cannot, should have been a pretty big clue!

caretaker

Good spot. There's actually an exaggerated Ontario accent I call the "phoney Ontario theatre people" accent. The urban Canadian prairie accent is almost flat, and not easily confused with any other English accent, so for some time large corporations moved their call centres here, but eventually the cheap overseas competition took that away. The Nova Scotians I've known speak what I'd call Newfoundland Lite, and the only New Brunswickers I know have French accents.

petitefrancaise

ChronowerX_GT

even lets you filter by state haha.

So it's really just Britain is weird then. When you consider the vastness of the US and a lot of the states sound the same, or more of a gradual change at least, then the fact 2 miles is all it takes in Britain to have a different accent is pretty strange. I remember a Russian friend saying that you can't tell where a Russian is from since accents don't really change either.

robtuck

To do with the history of the language and when it developed. USA may be big, the language has only been isolated for a short while and mass transport and communication came around quickly to spread the "right way" to say things. So variation is smaller. In the UK the language was around for centuries before anyone even knew how to spell the words properly (or in a uniformed way). Add on top that we got invaded a lot and consumed other peoples languages, you get really small pockets of variation.