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I am currently in Moscow and I can tell anybody from Moscow just by their first sentence based on pronounciation - but almost only that. That is because Russian has a governing body that dictates what "real" russian is. English has no such body.

In English, words mean what people understand by them, not what they are suppose to mean.

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French has a governing body (l'Académie française) but, at least in some parts of the world, spoken french is very different from what is prescribed by the Académie. Plus the accents are so diverse, here in Québec we are 7 million people (and not all of them french speakers) and we have as much difference in the way we speak depending on the region as you have in the U.S. for example. Funny thing, when we visit France, the french sometimes answer us in english, because our accent is so thick that they think french is not our native language.

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