Not bloody likely, I'm going in a taxi...

Do accents matter? Well, they're not the best indicators of a person's character when you first meet, although, everybody makes certain assumptions as soon as you open your mouth. In a country so obsessed with class and status, as the British undoubtedly are, your accent or dialect gives away so much about you. How can such a relatively small island hold such a vast array of intonation and pronunciation?

You don't need to travel to some far flung corner of Albion, however, to witness peculiar pronunciations. No, nevermind your Yorkshire brogue or your Cockney rhyming slang; you needn't look any further than that once favorite accent of the BBC (and it really is just another accent), Received Pronunciation (RP). Here, you'll find some pretty ripe examples that make a nonsense of any link between spelling and pronunciation. English is certainly not a phonetic language.

So before we start sneering at the way the Welsh, Scots or Irish pronounce our beloved mother tongue, consider the spelling of the following words compared to how we're told they should be pronounced in Received Pronunciation:

Leicester (Lester)
Gloucester (Gloster)
Bicester (Bister)
Leominster (Lemster)
Cholmondley (Chumley)
Marjoribanks (Marchbanks)
Colquhoun (Cahoon)
Featherstonehaugh (Fanshaw)

And how the hell does Lieutenant end up sounding like Leftenant in the British Army, L'tenant in the British Navy and Lootenant in other countries' forces?

George Bernard Shaw, the Irish dramatist, attempted to reform English spelling to reflect English pronunciation but was unsuccessful, despite a lengthy campaign. His play, Pygmalion (later made into the musical My Fair Lady), deals with dialect and how important it is if you want to break out of the class you were born in to.

Consider the different ways we pronounce ough in the following words:

though (as in toe)
tough (as in cuff)
cough (as in toff)
hiccough (as in up)
plough (as in cow)
through (as in blue)
nought (as in caught)
lough (as in loch)

Shaw is often attributed with using the example of ghoti as an alternative spelling of fish to point out how ridiculous the rules of English spelling actually are. Whether this actually was Shaw or not, doesn't matter. He was right; British English, in its spelling and pronunciation (and often in its grammar), has no rhyme nor reason. Add to this regional and class variation and you've got a time-bomb awaiting any foreigner foolish enough to want to master this tongue.

Having said that, most of the inhabitants of these isles speak English as if it were a foreign language...