[ichabod1]

So is English.

Yes! As with the Dutch, if you take out the gutteral nature and the funny spellings (and letters) German becomes extremely understandable for an English speaker.

Most choirs have very little to no accent.

As a choir singer, I have to let you in on a little trade secret. We work extremely hard to get the accent out of the singing. In Chicago they want to sing with a broad 'a' and in the south they want to put a dipthong into words like 'to' (teeewww). The better the choir, the more uniformity of enunciation.

[GretchenM]

I had an epiphany about British vs. American English in the early 1960's when the Beatles hit the air waves. On almost every word (excepting those that the Brits would add the ending, non-existent "r"), the Brits sounded exactly like Americans. Aha! said I. WE must be speaking the correct pronunciation of words in English. I understand what you mean about choirs working to enunciate uniformly. I don't think the Beatles and others of their genre were doing that; I think rather that they were just singing naturally.