Tleilaxu, I laughed so hard at your subway story I nearly fell off the couch and smashed my crooked yellow teeth on the coffee table.
This thread reminds me of a time I was on a train from London to Nottingham. Sitting across from me was an Australian family. About an an hour into the journey, the father turned to me and asked, in a fairly strong Aussie accent, "Excuse me, can you tell me when this train gets to Looga Borooga?"
I tried to absorb what he said and replied, "I'm sorry, where?"
"Looga Borooga," he repeated.
I shook my head and asked if I could see the timetable he was holding.
"Oh, Luffburruh!" said I. (Sorry about the phonetic spelling but if I wrote 'Loughborough', how many of you would have heard 'Looga Borooga' in your head?)
With regard what Morrus and others have said about Brit proximity to medieval architecture, I used to live in Nottingham. Nottingham used to have a beautiful medieval street layout. In the 1960s, half of it was bulldozed and replaced by a horrific dual carriageway lined with concrete monstrosities including a multi-storey car park. This blight on the landscape was then sympathetically named 'Maid Marion Way'. To add insult to injury, in the eighties, the Tourist Board opened a nasty, ultra-modern and rather poorly engineered animatronics attraction called 'The World of Robin Hood' amid the offending concrete.
Still, Nottingham's great. I miss it. Even if Ye Olde Trip To Jerusalem's claim to be the oldest pub in the world is a load of hogwash, it's still ancient and serves a decent pint (or used to).
Back on topic: I think halflings should have Devonshire or Cornish accents, gnomes should speak in a southern Irish accent, dwarves should have either a Lancashire accent, a southern American drawl or - my favourite - a German accent, elves in a bad French accent (let's parlez Franglais) and orcs are Australian, naturally. Oh, human wizards and bad guys should sound like Christopher Lee, Alan Rickman et al...
"G'day, human scum!"