How do accents form

Human nature, vague as it sounds, simply refers to our innate love of being in groups. When a human is part of a crowd, they identify membership by wearing certain styles of clothing or eating specific foods.

That group of people also may speak a certain way — so distinctly so that an accent becomes part of the group's identity. As for isolation, imagine a group of people that speaks the same language but becomes divided onto two islands.

This geographical and social divide means that each group will evolve distinct dialects, or accents, over time. In fact, the language used by these groups may diverge so much to sound like completely different languages. But here's the thing: Humans are remarkably well-traveled, and don't often exist in isolation. When we come across other distinct groups, it's possible to pick up another accent, either by choice or by long-term exposure.

Ever meet a college student who returns from a semester in England, for instance, sounding subtly different? We get new words, there are grammatical changes, and accents change over time. If you listen to recordings made by people from your own language community years ago, you will hear for yourself that even over that time accents have changed.

Try out some of the links from the Spoken Word Archive Group , for example. Human nature. In all sorts of ways, we behave like those we mix with.

We are members of social groups, and within our social group we like to behave in similar ways and show that we belong. We do this in language as well as in other ways e. When groups become distinct, the way they speak becomes distinct too. This happens socially and geographically, but is easiest to illustrate by geographical differences. If a single group splits into two imagine that one half goes to Island A and one half to Island B , then once they have separated, their accents will change over time, but not in the same way, so that after just one generation the accent of Island A will be different from the accent of Island B.

If they stay completely separated for centuries, their dialects may become so different that we will start wanting to say they are speaking two different languages. Humans like to travel. Since humans left their place of origin in East Africa, more than , years ago, they have spread all over the world. And they have moved in waves in some places, mixing with, or conquering, people who were there earlier.

One of the last places humans reached was New Zealand, which Polynesian people now known as 'Maoris' settled in the fourteenth century CE , joined by Europeans four hundred years later. English developed in England as a result of people moving to England from across the North Sea in the fifth century CE -- they were at least the fourth major wave of humans to reach the island of Britain, and the descendants of the previous waves were still there when they arrived to mix with them.

In modern times the last years the activities of aggressive and acquisitive Europeans has resulted in them moving all over the world and taking their languages especially English, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch and French with them. Separate development accounts for some accent variation. But sometimes we need to talk about the first generation of speakers of a particular language brought up in a new place.

The first children to grow up in a new place are very important. The children who grow up together are a 'peer group'. They want to speak the same as each other to express their group identity. The accent they develop as they go through their childhood will become the basis for the accents of the new place.

So where does their accent come from? The first generation of children will draw on the accents of the adults around them, and will create something new.

If people move to a new place in groups as English speakers did to America, Australia and New Zealand that group usually brings several different accents with them. The children will draw on the mixture of accents they hear and create their own accent out of what they hear. The modern accents of Australia are more similar to London accents of English than to any other accent from England -- this is probably because the founder generation in the eighteenth century had a large component drawn from the poor of London, who were transported to Australia as convicts.

The accents of New Zealand are similar to Australian accents because a large proportion of the early English-speaking settlers of New Zealand came from Australia. The mix found in the speech of the settlers of a new place establishes the kind of accent that their children will develop.

But the first generation born in the new place will not keep the diversity of their parents' generation -- they will speak with similar accents to the others of their age group. And if the population grows slowly enough, the children will be able to absorb subsequent children into their group, so that even quite large migrations of other groups such as Irish people into Australia will not make much difference to the accent of the new place.

Most parents know this. If someone from New York US marries someone from Glasgow Scotland, UK , and these two parents raise a child in Leeds England, UK , that child will not speak like either of the parents, but will speak like the children he I know of such a child!

To understand what happened in the past we need strong evidence from both language and history. We need to know about the places that migrants came from, and something about the kinds of accents they are likely to have had.

Is there a Standard English accent? There is not a single correct accent of English. There is no neutral accent of English. All speakers of English need to cope with many different aspects and learn how to understand them. Some accents are associated with social groups who have high prestige the kinds of accents spoken by highly educated people, for example , but there are also many of these high prestige accents, all of them regionally based.

The accents that are traditionally taught to non-native speakers of English are high prestige accents from various places. Lantolf points out that much of Pennsylvanian dialect "is a reflection of the influence of English and Irish settlers. Scranton has a particularly heavy Irish influence. The pioneer settlers in Pennsylvania's anthracite region which encompasses Scranton, Wilkes-Barre, Hazleton, and surrounding towns were largely Irish and German Catholics who worked in the area's coal mines.

Many Europeans—particularly Slavic and Italian immigrants—followed and contributed to the distinctive Coal Region culture and dialect. The English spoken by their descendants is colored by their mother tongues: The word brogue itself to describe an Irish accent originally meant a "stout coarse shoe worn formerly in Ireland and the Scottish Highlands," and insultingly implied that the Irish spoke English so poorly, it sounded like they had a boot in their mouths.

A recent study in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America has found the beginnings of a new English accent among the residents of the British Antarctic Survey, a group of researchers who spend months alone in isolation. Over the course of the study, there was a shift in the way residents pronounced various words.

This opportunity to view linguistics in action is incredibly rare. The current situation with Covid provides an interesting complement to this study. With a majority of people still practicing isolation and social distancing, some people are reporting changes in their native English accent due to having fewer external influences on their speech.

An accent is defined as a distinctive way of pronouncing the words of a language. The best examples of English accent variances can be found in the UK. In a country the size of Michigan, there are at least 37 distinct accents and dialects, each with wildly unique features. Reading Irvine Welsh, watching Peaky Blinders, and listening to The Archers will give you a flavor of the variety of sounds found on the British Isles.

Some UK accents are barely intelligible even to fellow Brits from other regions: broad Scottish accents and North-East English accents are often confusing for other Brits.

Put simply, accents are born when speakers of the same language become isolated and, through evolution, unwittingly agree on new names or pronunciations for words. Linguistically isolated from each other for centuries, Proto-Germanic speakers in different regions developed their own codes, which in turn evolved into different languages: English, Dutch, Swedish, and dozens of other Germanic languages.

Learning about these common origins makes it obvious why some languages, such as English and Dutch, or Spanish and Portuguese, share so many common linguistic features. The reason why accent and dialect are so much more prominent in the UK, as opposed to the US, Australia, or Canada, is because English has been spoken in Great Britain for more than years.