>When does somebodies accent, which they gained in their country of origin, or from parents from off-island, become a "British Regional" accent? For instance, I don't think of the accent of people from the Indian sub-continent or the Carribean as "foreign" but as "regional" (or perhaps as "cultural") But mt Jugoslavian neighbours, who had lived in England for nearly thirty years, definitely had a "foreign" accent.
I noticed earlier that someone mentioned Jamaican. I was going to say that the first words that my daughter heard when she was born in a London hospital was "doesn't she look like her daddy" said in warm, musical London-Jamaican accent by the midwife.
I think sounding "foreign" has more to do with words that are slightly mis-pronounced in the way that someone would if their first language is not English. Several of my friends have parents who moved here from Poland and their parents still sound "foreign".
There are now a number of people whose parents were born in India or Pakistan and who have very defined Northern English or Scottish accents. A good example is seen in the film "East is East". I'm still slightly thrown by this (yet know that I shouldn't be) as most of my friends with families from the Indian Subcontinent have (rather posh) Southern English accents. I suppose that this is part of the problem with racism. A person with Polish parents has a Lancashire accent and no-one can tell where they came from.
