Cross-border questions...

When I lived in Canada, people - Canadians and Americans - were always quick to tell me how different Canadian accent(s) are from the 'General American' accent, although I often saw Canadians and Americans mis-identify each other. If a Canadian has 'Canadian raising' in their speech (the classic Canadian pronunciation of words like 'about') then it's fairly obvious, but many Canadians do not have this feature. Often the desire to appear different is stronger than the difference itself.

For some reason, in the UK, there seems to be a bit of a seige mentality (especially in the media and business) with regards to some borders. I don't know about Wales, but we definitely see it in Scotland, with people happy to travel to Carlise, but coming to Scotland is like travelling to Australia. This also seems to work in the other direction, and I've met some people from the borders of Scotland who live about 20 miles from Carlise, and think their nearest city is Glasgow, about 100 miles away.

For most people in my experience, the accent is part of their "identity", and whilst I can discern both Scottish and English idioms both sides near to the borders, they are mostly one or the other.

Cogito, about the German sounding (or derived) words in Polish. I speak an old-fashioned Polish learned from my mother who was from Eastern Poland (now in Belarus). I say kartofle for potatoes, and there are lots of other Polish words derived from German.

However, after the war, there was an effort to make words more Slavic and less German, so kartofle, for example, was changed to "ziemniaki", with the root of ziemia meaning earth. It's the only example I can think of offhand, but I'm sure there were others. Even so, anyone in Poland, not just Silesia, would know what you mean if you say kartofle.

I agree with #8 about Queenslanders. I have also noticed that the accent of people from Adelaide almost sounds like cockney English.

Back to the US/Canada border...a linguist at the University of Washington determined that folks in the Northwest actually DO have an accent (although we don't think we do since we talk like most people we hear on tv/movies). Apparently our "dialect" is directly influenced by Canada (specifically British Columbia) although we generally think they talk a lot different and can usually pick out a Canadian - if nothing else, by their use of the word "eh" at the end of many sentences :) (I have relatives in British Columbia and can testify that they sound different than me!). I think that the people in the U.S. states of North Dakota and Wisconsin particularly speak with a very strong accent that I equate with Canada. (think "Fargo" - but I work with people from back there and they really do talk like that!) That's as far east as my opinion stretches though.

<blockquote>Quote
<hr>a linguist at the University of Washington determined that folks in the Northwest actually DO have an accent (although we don't think we do since we talk like most people we hear on tv/movies).<hr></blockquote>
That's interesting. When I lived in Canada, people (Canadians!) frequently told me that they didn't have an accent. You rarely hear that comment from Brits, who are often very aware of where their accent fits in socially/regionally.

The strongest influence on diversification of Slovene dialects were political and ecclesiastical administrative divisions - geography had mostly indirect influence, influencing administrative borders. It's hard to compare this to modern times though, as the basic differences stem from 12th/13th century, when the borders (of property) were a much bigger, or at least different, obstacle for movement of people.

A former teacher of mine had done dialect research in the low countries and in Scandinavia. At times when there was a clear dialect boundary (clear to him, anyway) and nothing like a river to explain it, the explanation turned out to be a former parish boundary.

in holland it's not border dependent. along the german border the same dialect is spoken on each side of the border (but in modern times the influence of the superimposed standard languages is getting stronger of course), as a result the Dutch spoken along the German border sounds quite german.
along the belgian border the Dutch accent is similar to Flemish.
and in the west of the netherlands, dutch sound most like english despite the fact that there's a sea in between - long vowels have become diphtongized like in English and the 'English' pronunciation of R is gaining popularity.