How did we create different accents?

Everyone speaks different, some southern... some northern, German, French... whatever... how did it start? It's an interesting question I've always wondered about. So if you know or have any explanations PLEASE share!

First of all, you have to know that accents are changing all the time. People living in England right now speak with a slightly different accent than people who in England 60 years ago (you only need to listen to voice recordings from the past to hear this). So if you wait a long enough time, you'll be able to notice a change in a regional accent.To create different accents then, you could separate a tribe of people, and not let the tribes talk to each other for (say) 200 years. When you let the tribes speak to each other again, they will have different accents.To use the accents of English speakers as an example: In the 1600s, many English Speakers left England to live in America. At that time, the English speakers who lived in America spoke with the same accent as the Britons who lived in England. But because American English speakers didn't interact with English English speakers, their accents diverged.Accents aren't only influenced by separation, but also by having different cultures mix with each other. A microcosmic example of this would be, if a group of Jeordies (people with a working class Newcastle accent) shared a house with a group of Cockneys (people with a working class London accent). Depending on the group dynamics, their accents would influence each other to create a peculiar hybrid accent.

It all starts in grammer school, where kids make up new words

Languages mutate just like living things, just like DNA; and languages are passed on from parent to child and among peers.

Accent - Wikipediabasically, people pronounce things differently. These different pronunciations are spread through a group. If that group is isolated from others (needn't be total isolation) it becomes established.Accents change when people interact. As zawinul mentioned, we Americans no longer have a "british" accent. It's not so much that we were isolated from Britain in our case, but rather the mass influx of immigrants (italians, germans, scots-irish, etc). This mix helped create our current accents. Which itself has many different accents.Tell me--do you speak with an accent? You probably don't think so, while talking to people in your area. You only notice it when you talk to someone outside of your area. (like with the word doll )

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By "British" you perhaps mean English. You're right that it's not so much the isolation, but the mix. Just one group, like the pilgrims arriving in New England from Plymouth, would have contained individuals with a number of different accents, as they came from all over England. So even if you had a New World country that was populated by the English and only the English, it would inevitably end up with a new accent that would be none of the old regional accents, but a mixture of them all.There's an audible Irish influence in all North American accents, I think, which isn't surprising considering the level of migration. The Irish are the only group that I can think of here in ye olde worlde who pronounce the "t"s in the middle of a word with a soft "d" sound, which all Americans seem to do.Scots, Irish and Welsh accents reflect the vowel and consonant sounds of the languages spoken in those countries before English took over, in the same way that when French people say "the", "this" and "that" in English it comes out as "ze", "zis" and "zat", because they do not use our "th" sound in their own language. If English took over in France, their descendents might continue that habit.The English regional accents exist for the same reason. There were different mixes of different language groups in different areas (more Saxons in the south, vikings in the north, celts in the west, for example). When the Saxon language dominated, the vikings started speaking it with a foreign accent, just as the Scots did centuries later.All of our accents, wherever we are, reflect the cultural history of the area.Edited by bluegenes, : No reason given.

To expand on what crashfrog said, we could literally draw a parallel between the evolution of languages and the evolution of life. Geographical isolation causes 2 groups of the same language speakers to be seperated for generations. Slangs such as "ya'll" and other southern nonsensical sounds got caught on in one of the groups. After a few generations, the two groups make contact again and the result is me not being able to understand a damn word that waitress said in that restaurant in Chattanooga, TN.Over even longer periods of time, different accents could potentially result in different languages. A very good example of this is the romance languages we have today. No, romance languages are not the languages they use in dating services. Romance languages are languages that descended from latin. A creationist today might look at spanish, italian, and french and say that god created these languages at the tower of babel. But the reality is they all came from latin.Oh, wait... a famous creationist (Kent Hovind) did once make the claim that god created spanish and french at the tower of babel...

Yes, language is an excellent example of evolution in many ways, and I've seen it used as an analogy before. I'd just noticed the phrase on the original O.P. before you posted: I was going to edit that into my last post with the comment:"We didn't. They evolved."The comparison to biological evolution isn't 100% pure, though, because there are, of course, attempts to design language and create formal standard rules. Sometimes these attempts can be irrational, and cut across the nature of the language in a way that many people automatically reject them. The split infinitive rule is an example, and also the conditional "if it were", when common sense would give us "if it was".By the way, your Hovind quote is great. Do you know if there's ever been a Tower of Babel thread on EvC? That quote might be a good starting point. I think it would be as much fun as the "flud" threads, which I personally find hilarious. Edited by bluegenes, : No reason given.

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The comparison to biological evolution isn't 100% pure, though, because there are, of course, attempts to design language and create formal standard rules.

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Actually, I was thinking more along the lines that languages borrow from each other, and sometimes quite extensively.

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Actually, if their god makes better pancakes, I'm totally switching sides. -- Charley the Australopithecine

well, and then you have the intention of many english scholars (in America, Harvard specifically I seem to remember) of making english like the "perfect" language of latin. yay screwy non-germanic grammar.Plus, norman french and old english mixed (not sure which norman french version, though) when old Bill the conqueror conquered.Overall, the english language is just like one big clusterf**k.

Of course. Or, perhaps more correctly, Norman French and Anglo-Saxon mix to become early English.

That's a good point. Lots and lots of horizontal gene transfer in the history of languages, certainly!!

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Plus, norman french and old english mixed (not sure which norman french version, though) when old Bill the conqueror conquered.

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Actually, the main mixing occurred several hundred years later when the descendents of the French nobility, being fluent in both English and French, began using English as their everyday language, and importing a lot of French words in the process.

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Actually, if their god makes better pancakes, I'm totally switching sides. -- Charley the Australopithecine

nope. Take a look at old english--the 100 or so most common english words derive directly from it. The mix of norman french and Old English led to Middle English (among other mixes)--which to us is much more understandable.Old English - Wikipediacheck out the Lord's Prayer at the bottom of the page. Even with all the different characters, spellings, and words we don't use anymore, it still bears a similarity to Modern English (i think the translation is direct, w/o using today's grammar usage)Beowulf is Old English
Canterbury Tales (Chaucer) is Middle English
Shakespeare is Early Modern English
We speak, write, Modern English.But this is all off-topic. we're supposed to be discussing accents, not english language history.

Somewhat off-topic, but: I read somewhere that our common four-letter swear words are derived from the Anglo-Saxon, while the more polite "drawing-room" equivalents are derived from the French. (Sorry, but I'm too ladylike to give examples. )The "vulgar" (= "common") words were/are looked down on by the "proper" (= "clean") upper classes.

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