`  *someone who speaks modern Modern English is never said to have an accent (except maybe facetiously by those with thick regional accents) And by linguists, who acknowledge that everyone has an accent. As for using  to represent the American vowel in ``caught`` (for those who still distinguish it from ``cot``), J.C. Wells already does that in the Longman Pronunciation Dictionary, though in his case it's probably to emphasize how much more open the vowel is in American English than in British English, for which he uses traditional .  `