Racist to go to Canada? Geesh, looks like some people just want to troll around here.
Virtually all Americans won't leave the nation, unless shit goes horribly bad. IE the right-wing gets that Distopian Authoritarian government they've been hoping for. Mainly because moving isn't easy and Canada just doesn't take people in.
Umm... indistinguishable from an American one? Are you refer to a Boston, New York, Southern, Midwest, etc... accent?
The 'mainstream' American accent is the one you hear on American movies or tv shows, unless a character is pointedly supposed to be from somewhere specific. Australia has much less regional variation in dialects than America (and the variation seems to be vocabulary rather than pronounciation).
Americans, from the accent alone, could you tell someone was Canadian in ordinary conversation?
I might have a tin ear but I can't tell the
Canadian PM has a 'Canadian' accent but more like a 'North American continent' accent. Do these
tv show hosts sound "Canadian"?
I don't know if I could tell every Canadian from an American but yes, there is a distinction in regional accents among Americans living in the US and also a distinction between Canadian and US accents, including those from northern US States such as Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota (between those states) and also between any of those states and Canada. There are also differences in word choices. Some of those word choices are between regions and even states in the US. There are even differences in accents from different parts of New York City, for example. Manhattanites don't sound the same as those from say, the Bronx or Brooklyn, although this might be flattening out as people are more mobile and economic pressures make certain areas more 'trendy.
While there is a general southern accent, there are differences between accents of people from say, Kentucky, Tennessee, Georgia, Mississippi, Alabama, and so on. To my ear, accents are more pronounced when listening to people who are from more rural areas compared with those living in urban areas, no matter what region. I've noticed this within my family. Among two brothers, one worked a desk job in a city and the other farmed, all within 10 miles of the farm where they both grew up. The brother who farmed had a much more 'rural' accent than the one who worked in the city. I don't know if someone from outside the area would have picked up on it, but it was something I always heard.
Also, to my ear, many of the regional distinctions are flattening out or becoming obscured, probably because of the prevalence of mass media and also increased mobility. Or maybe I'm just getting old.
I would expect that Canadians have similar patterns of distinction between regions and rural vs urban. I don't think that's unusual. I used to work in a workplace which was quite international, with most employees being from the Middle East. They could identify which Middle Eastern nation someone was from by their accent (in Arabic) and were astonished that I distinguished between accents in the US. At the same time, they also had a very difficult time with some US regional accents.
