Word usage varies very slightly between regions, which means we may use colloquial phrases which don't make sense to people from other regions, but the core of the language is exactly the same so that it comes across as being the same dialect for many people.

In English a "dialect" is referring to a branch of a language that is very different from another branch. For the sake of comparison, try to imagine Mandarin Chinese versus Cantonese Chinese: being able to speak Mandarin doesn't mean you can speak Cantonese, and there are dozens of Chinese dialects.

Accents have to do with intonations and tonal differences that don't really have anything to do with the dialect that one is speaking.

Btw, Sweden is big enough to have it just as hard as the US to get a standardized accent.

But I'm saying there already is a standardized American accent, as well as an English accent - the 'default' accents. And those are the accents that you will hear from a language teacher or in a spoken text book and it's what actors and TV people usually strive for.

There is no default United States accent.

Thanks for explaining. So let's keep it to accents then, because that's how I understood the thread anyway.

I know there isn't an official one, but when the OP said "By american accent I mean the Midwestern columbus ohio middle class type" he tried to choose one that represents American accent "best" to a foreigner.

That has more to do with his perceptions than anything, though. Like - you don't think of that as the typical American accent, right?

Can you name someone who does have what you think of as a typical accent? Maybe Obama?

I don't know. I assumed the OP tried to do that, but maybe he failed.

What I am after is what CommonMan said above: "The average American accent would be the "Accent Neutral" dialect that is taught to newscasters I guess, the closest it comes is to a California accent." That's what I meant by default.

Now there aint no accent in the US that sounds exactly like that, but there are accents that sounds more, or less, like that. And that is my point.

Here in Sweden we say that many of us "try to speak without an accent" - meaning that there is a 'theoretical' default Swedish accent, what could be called "the right" accent - or "the Swedish language without accent" if you will.

Obama is fairly close, but I dont know how to discribe the sounds, but his "R"'s maybe are a bit too emphasized/intonated, and some other sounds too.

Off the top of my head I'd say Keanu Reeves.

When you have a nation as large and ethnically diverse as the United States, and one that is the top nation for immigration worldwide, you just can't say that it has a singular accent (or even anything close). When you have people from all over the world in one nation all trying to speak the same language, you just won't have one generic accent.

The strong Southern US accent sounds pretty bad (as in cowboy movies but not limited to those)... but it can be funny too. Other American accents sound much better, and are the easiest form of English to understand IMO.

The standard British accent sounds pretentious and it's not as easy to understand as most American accents. Some other British accents are almost impenetrable, such as the Sccotish accent.