In regard to the comment on Americans not having the variety or plethora of accents present in the UK, I have a mixed response. Part of me wants to be angry because that is a pretty ignorant statement, but another part wants to agree with you for some strange reason.

I will start off by stating that I am from California, and still being a teenager I haven't had TOO much experience in travel around the country, but I have been to enough states/places to notice various accents (linguistic variations definitely interest me, and my finding of this site was a direct result of this). In my, albeit concise experience I have found that accents certainly are present based on geographical region... the South and Midwest have very different accents from one another, especially the Upper-Midwest. As many before me have stated, almost every state has at least its own ideosyncrasies (sp?) or accent(s), and even various parts of states have their own accent. One example was my recent orientation session at my college in Southern California... I found that the kids from Northern California, though their accent wasn't strikingly different from my SoCal accent, used words which we definitely noticed and proceeded to make fun of (Hella, Hecka... Chill (as a state, not a command)). So to state that we Americans have a ubiquitous and ambiguous accent is definitely a misconception.

The other half of me wants to agree (slightly) with you, though. The UK is much smaller in area (duh) but has a ton of variation in accents, which some might argue have bigger variations between one another than do the American accents. My defense is that America has not been a nation for nearly as long and we haven't had enough time to be settled in regions for long enough to develop huge variations apart from those which have already taken place.

In California, although I have noticed a prevalent accent, I have noticed that even amongst my group of friends, each person has their own accent (a quick example, my friends and I bug the crap out of each other for our pronunciation of the word "beg"), and I think this is true because most residents of California moved here from other states, and we kind of have a mixture of accents. Sorry for all the digressing... I'm an insomniac .

In regard to the question about whether the "American" dialect that the British hear on TV/in the Movies is legitimate... I would say yes, depending upon the source. If you're talking hip-hop music... hell no, I can't understand half of that stuff. If it's a news source... yeah, fairly accurate. In the movies... yes, mostly.

And I think someone asked a question about what our impression of the British dialect via the media. To tell you the truth, the only channel I can get direct access to British-accent would have to be BBC News, and even that, like someone said before, tells me how the news anchors talk, not how the general populace speaks. Sure, there's the general idea that British English is much more "proper" sounding, and we'll put on an attempted British accent (bastardized by British standards or not) if we're trying to act "posh" or fancy.

About the "gotten" issue... I'll use got and gotten both, depending on the situation, so don't think that all Americans just say gotten (although I'll admit I use it more than got). And about burnt/learnt... I think that most Americans use burnt as the past participle and also an adjective... but not learnt, although we do say burned for both the past-tense and also occasionally past participle.

I have a question... is the general conception of the American accent by British people that it's "annoying" or do you guys have another idea of it? Personally I would think it would be annoying and nasal-y but I dunno.

Sorry for the random post... it's my first and I had a lot of stuff to talk about :P