What are the disadvantage of having a strong accent?

Human beings are social animals their lives are dominated by the desire to communicate with others, it is what makes them happy, just look at the importance of a modern phone is to people all over the world.

In the past people were unable to travel vast distances and were limited in their spoken communication to a small group of people who lived in their local area (say a days walk in any direction). This isolation allowed local accents and dialects to develop which were spoken and clearly understood by the people in a local area. There was no problem everyone in that area spoke the same way. However move 10 days walk away and the traveller would now be in a region where they were not familiar with the dialect or accent and there would be difficulties in understanding other and being understood.

To overcome this governments encouraged the teaching of a standard accent across all schools so that people from various regions could use this to communicate outside their region.

If one moves up a scale and looks at different countries rather than regions. Then countries spoke entirely different languages and in the past Lain was used as the common language for communication (Swahili in East Africa served the same purpose).

In modern times people from all over the world seem to have agreed that English (or American English) is the best language to use as a universal language and this has enabled people and countries to begin to communicate with one another as has never been seen at any time in the past.

What I am trying to get across that a really strong local accent can be like speaking a foreign language and unless a person can also speak another accent (or language) they are at a disadvantage in the communication game.

This said it is important that languages and accents are not lost in the rush to communicate across the world, local languages and dialects/accents can be very beautiful to hear and relate back to past way of living. Accents make us all richer and individual.