Do you speak standard English? I don’t. I speak with a bit of a mixture of accents, as I have moved around a lot. I find our wide variety of accents and dialects in Britain interesting. I think it would be boring if we all sounded the same. I also like foreign accents. I enjoy trying to identify them. Of course, I want to be able to understand people, but you can be clearly spoken or unintelligible in any accent. Even posh people can sound quite unclear sometimes.
I try to reflect the way different people speak when I write dialogue. Some of my characters will have slight accents, others stronger ones. In Accounting for Murder: Double Entry, there are people with Asian accents as well as Welsh, London or Lancashire. I hope readers will be able to mal sense of all the dialogue, but will find the different characters more interesting because they do not all speak in the same way.
I am sorry to hear that some people are sensitive about any reference to their accents. They seem to think they are being mocked. I certainly disapprove of laughing at people because of the way they speak. Merely noting it, however, should not in itself be considered offensive.
I hope nobody will think I am mocking any group of people. I do not consider Welsh people, for instance, as inferior because they have their distinctive way of pronouncing English. I expect English people have distinctive ways of pronouncing Welsh. Long may it be so!
