I truly don’t understand accents. My only experience is as an American learning Spanish; it was stressed pretty hard to use the Spanish accent – that had at least equal weight with confugating verbs. I’m sure that my Spanish accent is absolutely crappy and I’m easily identifiable as an American, but as far as I’m aware English to Spanish stresses the accent.
What confuses me is when people from, say, India, speak English, they often have a strong accent. They stress odd syllables and pronounce letters differently than they “should.” I know it’s difficult in some cases to form sounds from another language due to them just not existing in the original language, but…like English doesn’t roll it’s Rs, yet I do when I speak Spanish (again, badly I’m sure)?
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Some languages are more similar than others, and have more sounds in common, similar stress patterns, etc., which can make it easier to learn the new language.
India is kind of a unique case, in that India has hundreds of languages and uses English as its official language, so while any educated person in India will speak English fluently, it’s likely not their first language *and* they may not have had much exposure to native speakers outside media, even though they’ll use the language regularly. The goal isn’t to have English that blends in with Brits, Americans, Aussies, etc., but to speak English that your coworker (whose native language may be different than yours) can understand. With that said, if you speak to *upper class* Indians, they will likely have an accent that sounds much more British.
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