Rainard Jalen

Everybody speaks in a certain dialect/accent/register of a language which should be recognizable to the informed outsider. The homeless person getting the point that you were Californian is a good example of this - in the United Kingdom there is quite a lot of television exposure to various Californian accental varieties through a number of sitcoms and other shows, so for the one with a good ear it's quite recognizable.

What I find interesting though is the point that you've never really thought of yourself as speaking in a certain way. I mean, personally I found that just hearing people speak differently all the time made me automatically conscious from early on that I must talk in a certain way and that it is only one way among many. It's interesting to try to put on other regional accents and then to carefully observe and consider the huge amounts of differences in pronunciation, intonation and so forth; tests like this make one realize just how much they themselves are speaking differently.