Can you tell where someone is from in China by the way they talk? I'm sure you can! It's the same all over the world. There can never be a 'standard' English, or any other widely-used language.
Received Pronunciation (RP), commonly called BBC English and Standard British pronunciation or Southern British pronunciation, is an accent of Standard English in the United Kingdom and is defined in the Concise Oxford English Dictionary as "the standard accent of English as spoken in the south of England ", although it can be heard from native speakers throughout England and Wales.
from wikipedia
Mandarin or Putonghua is a nationwide standard Chinese used in the mainland of China. It has been standardized and legalized. As I stated in the first post, many top Chinese schools require teachers to pass Mandarin test. Asides for ordinary teachers, most professional hosts, anchors, broadcasters are well-trained in the media universities.
I am not completely able to tell where people are from in China simply by their accents. Some people I can; some people I can't.
I am from the south of China, and went to Dalian which is an eastnorthern city for a few days, and I was soon affected with the local accent. When I took the taxi after I walked out from the plane, the taxi driver asked me where I was originally from. I said, "Can you guess"? He said "Eastnorthern provinces?" He was wrong about that.
Besides Mandarin, I learnt Japanese before. The textbooks were named
Standard Japanese which is based on Tokyo accent. The textbooks were co-edited by Sino-Japanese linguists.
I learnt a little German before. However the accent or the pronunciation of German I learnt is based on certain standard. There are two Germans. One is called high German. The other is called low German. My friends study in Germany. He said it was very difficult for him to understand his lecturers' German who are from the South.
4. I can't speak for British schools, but I think that western society as a whole is learning to judge people by the content of their character, and not by the way they talk, as long as they demonstrate proper grammar and usage.
I think there's a popular idea in the West which is called political correctness. However the reality is not really all about correctness. I've searched the Internet before that many Western people claimed that they have been discriminated because of their accents.
Martin Luther King said "We judge people by the content of their character, but not by their skin". Something like that. I couldn't recite his words verbatim. Sadly it is undeniable fact that there is still racism in the West as well as in the USA too.
And I believe classes are still important in the UK, and some other European countries. So British people, if not all, are interested in the royal family. Many British politicans actually are from the upper class.
American movie named My Fair Lady produced in 1964 tells how accents were important in England. Why did the haughty professor fall in love with the humble forist? Why did she finally become a fair lady? Would you say the change of her accent was not a factor, even if it would have been a minor factor?