Wow, extremely interesting! I must say that title goaded me into clicking the article.

I had a classmate in 5th grade who went to Australia for the summer, and returned with a pronounced accent. It really gave us a thrill.

I know lots of British English, but I find it difficult to speak unless I'm in a British environment.

I am from northern Connecticut on the Massachusetts border. I had a fairly typical rural New England accent. As an adult I decided I wanted to own a farm and I hated the NE winter, so I moved to southern Missouri. I now sound like I was born here, but if I go home I'm back to dropping R's and calling milkshakes "frappes" within a day.

I grew up in S.E. Connecticut, and we called them milkshakes.

First time I heard frappe was on a visit to Rhode Island.

(A pretty short distance, granted.)

One of the wildest things about New England is how a short distance gets you a totally different culture. I used to go to New Britain (CT) a lot, what a different world from the Windsor area.

I was really given a wake up call one day when I realized that the trip to the airport here in Missouri is longer than driving all the way across CT. Heck, I think to get to the nearest airport is about the same distance as driving to Portland Maine from the CT border (fourish hours)

And yet, driving 30 minutes through CT is more boring than 4 hours through MO :)

Yes CT highways are soul sucking. The endless monotony of urban sprawl is mindnumbing. It is little wonder I hated driving anywhere as a child.

I always get excited when there's a linguistics post on hackernews only to get disappointed by yet another analysis of the vowels of English dialects.

I spent 2 winters in Antarctica with people with strong accents, e.g. Scottish, Welsh, Northern Irish, Scouse, Geordie, Cumbrian, and Devonian. On my return to the UK a lot of people said I'd developed a Brummie accent, although none of my fellow winterers were from Birmingham. My theory was that I'd developed an accent averaged across all the strong ones! It's interesting to see a scientific study showing how accents changed over an Antarctic winter!

Anyone can run praat and do formant analysis but understanding where and what normalization is needed is what makes this kind of thing really tricky.