Given the rising prominence of nonstandard varieties of English around the world (Jenkins 2007), learners of English as a second language are increasingly called on to communicate with speakers of both native and non-native nonstandard English varieties. In many classrooms around the world, however, learners continue to be exposed only to so-called standard varieties of English, leaving them unprepared for real-world encounters with non-standard speakers. This study investigates the ability of five non-native English speakers (NNS) to understand the speakers of one variety of nonstandard English, Southern American English. Following the model of Deterding's (2005) examination of Singaporeans' comprehension of Estuary English, the paper first considers the degree to which high-proficiency NNSs were able to comprehend a Southern dialect and their comments on the speech data. These results are compared to the findings of Deterding (2005) and Major, Fitzmaurice, Bunta, and Balasubramanian (2005), and possible explanations for the findings are considered. The paper concludes with implications for teaching English listening comprehension, particularly by preparing learners in both ESL and EFL contexts to deal with nonstandard varieties. (Contains 3 tables.)