How Did Accents Come to Exist?

Question

I'm not quite sure why everyone talks so differently!

I mean, of course, their ancestors talked like that, and so on... but, why do Americans have "Southern Drawls" and "Yankee Accents" and so on? I mean, we came from EUROPE, but no one from there talks like that! So where it come from?

And how did accents come to exist in the first place? Does living in a certain part of the world make you talk in a certain manner? That can't be correct! Did someone just start talking like that one day? And why are there soooo many different ones?

It just all really blows my mind! XP

~Thanks!!! ^^

Answer 1

You should hear the people who live in Hawaii.  Combo of Asian and South Pacific languages all rolled into one local accent called "pigeon".

Answer 2

accents came about becaus different  languages have different fundamental sounds, and when one learns a secondary language, the often use the different sounds to pronounce words

Answer 3

they were influenced by their made up slangs and immigrants and countries bordering

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how dare you motherfuqkers give me thumbs down. i try to help and anwer the question and this is what i get.im gonna report everyone of your answers using my multiple acvounts and this question too and have them deleted

Answer 4

Well, the way I understood it is that in the ages before mass communication allowed people to talk to someone on the other side of the world in an instant, different regions that spoke the same language would be isolated from one another- even those that were settled by immigrants who spoke the same dialect, eventually the language sort of "evolves" over a period of time inputting different words unique to that specific region.

And it gets more complicated when, for instance with English you factor in the fact that the different regions have different ethnic backgrounds. So in the southern United States, for instance, you have a lot of Scots-Irish influence in the vocabulary, while in Minnesota it's got a definite Scandinavian influence; while South Africa was greatly influenced by the Dutch Afrikaners, in Australia you'll find a great many people who are descended from those who originally spoke with a Cockney accent.

And yes, of course, accents and dialects proliferate throughout virtually all languages in the world- it's not an English-only phenomenon. I can go to any town in Mexico and people can easily identify that I grew up speaking the variety of Spanish from northern Spain, as easily as someone in Detroit could pick up a British accent.

Answer 5

It's a sort of evolutionary process. People tend to drift in their pronunciation, especially when young. They tend also to conform to what they hear around them. So local areas tend to develop characteristic accents that are different from other places.

If the process goes on long enough, with sufficient isolation, entire dialects and even new languages can develop. This is what happened with the romance languages over the past 2000 years or so.

Answer 6

Lol, someone else answer! I wanna know now!

Answer 7

I will answer with a question: how could accents not exist? How could you ensure that different people speaking the same language in different areas speak exactly the same way?

While languages evolve rather slowly, you could probably perceive some differences in the way you and your grandparents talk. Pronunciation is a very volatile part of language. In fact, most people are rather unaware of what they say as most phonological processes are rather conspicuous. For instance, when you say "bank" in American English, the "a" becomes nasalized because of its proximity to the "ng" sound that follows. And it's "ng" rather than "n" because it is in proximity to the k. Many processes are involved in such a small word and these processes are volatile -- they can change easily, quickly and fairly easily. And no, a place does not cause an accent. But there are certain tendencies over geographic areas. For instance, in the 1800s, the French started replacing z with a new r sound. That sound spread to the area and is now also found in German, Dutch and Danish even though these are different language families.

The existence of various accents is a small-scale indication of how easily language can differ in groups that are geographically or culturally separated. Ultimately, it is the same process that has lead to English being distinct from German, Dutch, Danish, etc. Over time, all languages change, evolve, merge, divide, influence eachother, etc.

Answer 8

In some languages, some sounds don't exist. Like in Korea there's no "f" sound, so when they say "coffee" it's "coppee."

It can be hard to say a certain sound if you've never said it or you've barely said it in the past, and thus people start talking in their own "odd" way.