True story: my grandmother grew up in the city of Nottingham, but moved to South Wales. She was chatting on the doorstep with a neighbour, when a stranger passed, stopped and turned, and asked if my grandmother was from - not Nottingham, but - a particular suburb in Nottingham!! That's how diverse our accents are!

There are over 300 accents in the UK. The most well known tend to be ones associated with particular cities or areas. Having said that, there would also be different accents within those cities and areas as well, which locals would be able to tell apart. I think most people from the UK could hear people speaking English from anywhere in the world and still understand them (with a few exceptions), so it blows our mind when you can't tell the difference between two hugely different accents or say that you can't understand them. Perhaps, our brains have developed to be good with accents, because we are exposed to them so much.

There's something wrong Tyler if you can't tell the difference between Scouse and RP😂

The UK isn't a large place now, but when you had to travel days by horse to get anywhere it was a whole lot bigger and most people wouldn't stray far from their village. It probably felt like travelling to another country does to us now.

For hundreds of years people's lives were pretty much confined to a 20 mile area (a day's walk or so), so there are lots of unique accents.

Tyler, the reason there’s such variation in such a small place (compared to US) is that we are much older than the US. The world was a much bigger place when they developed. Just 50 miles down the road would be a day of travel and so accents developments very separately. To the extent some were not just accents or dialects but their own language even, like Scots. The modern accents are actually watered down versions of the dialects/languages they once were which would have been almost unintelligible to each other in many cases.

There’s no such thing as a “normal” British accent.  When most other countries think of the British accent they think English accent and the posh version. Some of these as a previous comment stated, are tame or a stereotype.  The range of accents throughout the UK is more than 17, way more.

Britain is much older than cars and trains.  The accents were developed when few people ever left the town they were born in.

Hearing "Scouse" be described as the same as "RP English" is HILARIOUS to me!!! 😂😂

There are 40 plus just in England. A lot of the differences are very subtle. Even many British can't tell one from the other if they are close to sounding the same.

She's not exagerating the differences, she absolutely nails it! very accurate. How do we have so much more variety in accents in a tiny space? I'm guessing because we have waaaaay more history.

Ive got a Northern Ireland accent  but she was doing a Belfast accent. We have many variations in our wee country too, like Derry , Ballymena and my Armagh accent.

The fundamental answer to "why are there so many accents in the UK when it's so much smaller than the USA?" is that for a much, MUCH larger percentage of the USA's history, movement of people and hearing people from other regions via mass media has been possible. For hundreds and hundreds of years here in the UK (and much of the old world), people were effectively limited to their home village and maybe a few nearby where they would go to trade; they spoke almost exclusively with people from their own village, and as such accents and dialects could continue to develop to be more and more divergent and geographically specific. Essentially, without TV, radio, phones, and cars, the world is effectively much bigger - remember that distance is only really relevant relative to how easily distance can be covered.

Welsh is its own language, it's a Celtic dialect. Just as "Scottish" is a very different vernacular to "English with a Scottish accent".

Her scouse was very tame. That also depends on which part of Liverpool you grew up in.

Her “London” accent is what is more commonly known as a Cockney accent, and mostly to be found in the East End of London.

RP is a deliberate way of pronouncing words correctly and clearly

Recieved Pronounciation is a artifical accent created when radio first became popular. It was designed to ensure that no matter where you were in England or how bad your radio reception was, you could understand what the person was saying. We have a lot of accents for two reasons. Lots of people have migrated to england over the years or invaded. We also didnt travel very far in general until more mass transit like trains came around so accents reinforced each other in small areas.

The Republic of Ireland is not part of the UK, only northern Ireland the two are different countries, and accents can change within the same county the Yorkshire accent can change from city to city.

Stephen Fry be from East Anglia, but you cetainly could'nt tell that, by the way he speaks. He's what they call Public School, where, it seems, the first thing they do is "beat any accent out of you",  metaphorically or physically.