Do people not realise that Britain is made up of England, Wales and Scotland? Which, on the surface, have three very distinguishable accents, but then each country is also made up of a variety of different accents. I genuinely can't understand it, 9 times out of 10, the comments I've seen (youtube, yahoo answers, twitter etc) are referring to an English accent, so why is it so difficult to just say English? I have never come across anyone in Britain who would refer to their accent as British, as opposed to the individual country they come from, so where have the rest of the world got this from?
Ikr. It's the same as people saying they speak Spanish when there are actually more than 4 languages from Spain. But I guess that's more obscure to the general people