General discussion

When a standard language and pronunciation are defined by a group, an accent may be any pronunciation that deviates from that standard. However, accent is a relative concept, and it is meaningful only with respect to a specified pronunciation reference. For example, people from New York City may speak with an accent in the perception of people from Los Angeles, but people from Los Angeles may also speak with an accent in the perception of New Yorkers. Americans hear British people speaking with an accent and vice versa. Thus the concept of a person having "no accent" is meaningless. As phonologists are fond of saying, "a person without an accent would be like a place without a climate."

Groups sharing an identifiable accent may be defined by any of a wide variety of common traits. An accent may be associated with the region in which its speakers reside (a geographical accent), the socio-economic status of its speakers, their ethnicity, their caste or social class, their first language (when the language in which the accent is heard is not their native language), and so on.