define 'english'.
the english i speak is differently pronounced than the english of the people around me. (i'm american, if you've forgotten
)
pronunciation of similar words here can vary over a distance of 20 miles or so.
pronunciations in the USA vary from north to south, east to west. canadian english and northern US american english are darn close until you get to the pronunciation of 'about', USA it's 'abowt', in canada it's 'aboot'. moving right along, spreading east and southwards from the UK, you'll have fun understanding a south african english accent - then when you get to autralia & NZ, even more vowel drift.
...and that's a language with a fairly strict spelling dictionary. also not mentioning that UK english accents changed a lot in the victorian era, prior to that, UK english sounded more like what they speak in west virginia, USA, according to linguists. (think of jody foster's accent in 'silence of the lambs', she doesn't actually speak like that in real life, she learned it with difficulty for the movie)
now take that and try to transcribe anything from that mess of english into a language that not only uses different characters to describe the sounds they use (and possibly sounds english doesn't even have) or a language like arabic where the vowels are indicated by little diacritical marks rather than by characters in the main alphabet (which only has an 'a' and a 'y'). the marks are even usually left off in texts as 'everybody knows' how to pronounce the word in their own dialect.
and heaven forbid you try chinese & their multiple dialects and 5000+ characters, which the japanese also use and renounce entirely differently.
then try translating a word from that other language back into english (or even the patois of 'engrish' used by many other countries)
it's a miracle we can understand anyone.
i, of course, do not have an accent
i suspect that anyone reading this also 'knows' THEY do not have an accent. everyone else does tho.
also haven't mentioned that we can use different words to describe things, like with my 18 mo. old saluki lurcher, she has 'feathers' (feathering). which i'm not sure what they are called in arabic to describe the long ear hair and wispy hair fringes on the back of their legs, on their feet and especially their tails.
bragtuitous doggy photo from last summer, her ear feathering is longer now) :