I am just enjoying one of my christmas books; By Hook or By Crook, by David Crystal.
The author is an authority on linguistics and the book is part of a BBC project he was involved in, attempting to record local, regional accents which are on the decline.
This is of course right up my street and an excellent choice for a well known words nerd like me (Thank you to Eileen and D.)

But being not only a nerd but an egocentric one it led me directly to think about my own accent.
My background is Cork, middle class,third level education. I have lived in Dublin for many years, in Kent in England for two years in my twenties and in the south east of Ireland since then.
All of these things are reflected in my accent , and much more besides.
One of the principal problems/benefits I have is that I have an accent whict seems to suffer from osmosis, by this I mean it sucks up, and is changed by passing accents.
As a student I had a girl-friend in Selby in Yorkshire and I went to stay with her and her family for a few days one Christmas.
On the way back, on the Liverpool boat I fell into conversation with an elderly Irish woman. Having chatted for some time about the weather she said to me
” Well there is no resaon to ask where you are from”
I grinned, my Cork background was obviously evident, her next remark then astounded me;”You’re from Yorkshire aren’t you”
My few days in Yorkshire had obviously completely conquered my native accent.

Many years later, when I had my own restaurant, I had an assistant chef with a sharp ear.
She informed me, after some time working with me, that she could tell who I was talking to on the phone, or at least from where they came, from my (unconsious I swear) adjustments to accents as I talked to them on the phone.
She was so uncannily accurate with her guesses that I have to accept the truth of the accusation.
That is the problem with the osmosis effect.
People tend to think that I am trying to be terribly posh when I talk to people with English public school educations when I end up sounding slightly posher than the Queen or, even worse this , when talking to people with strong Cork accents I end up sounding just like Jimmy Crowley.
The benefits are that I find it comparatively easy to sound fluent in a foreign language. My French sounds way better than it is, A lot of my time is spent in France nodding as I fail miserably to understand a long reply to a question I asked in French with a sufficiently good accent to fool the respondent into think I spoke the language with great fluency.

We are friends with an Italian family of restaurateurs here in Waterford and one night, many years ago they brought their , entirely monolingual Mother, on holiday from Italy, in to dinner.
Wanting to say something pleasant I asked one of the family for a sentence on the lines of “Did you enjoy your meal” in Italian which I could say to Mamma.
I said my piece and was rewarded with a long stream of Italian which was entirely byond me.
I did my noding gravely bit.
A few days later I met one of the family in Waterford who told me, with some delight, that Mamma was delighted with her meal, apparently she had said
“But you would expect that with an Italian Chef ”