Dear AnnaStrophic: I enjoyed the link, but I got more chuckles than clues to differences in regional speech. After years of conscious effort to pronounce "r" I do pretty well, but when I tried to learn some Irish Gaelic, I could not manage to reproduce the really trilled or rolled whatever the word was for it "r". Man spricht wie der Schnabel gewachsen ist, and sometimes it can be very difficult to change. I remember in the Philippines a doctor who worked in the same lab with me telling me how hard it was for him to say "ship." He simply could not do it even after a lot of inexpert coaching, it still sounded like "sheep". But even though I make a conscious effort to pronounce "r" people ask me if I am from Boston after just a few words, but most of them cannot say what it is that they notice. I have no talent whatsoever for identifying regional accents.