What is behind the different voice configurations some ethnic groups have?

Question

What I mean is there a physiological cause for the voice differences between ethnic groups? (larger vocal cords, etc.)

This may include accents but I'm looking at a multicultural society where the inhabitants have lived for generations and all speak the same language.

For me at least, it is very easy to tell if a black person is talking or singing, same goes for white people.

Answer 1

Despite what most people say, race is not skin deep. People of different races have many genetic differences. Overtime, people of different races have evolved different vocal cord structures. There isn't much of a reason for this, just the process of random evolution.

And I'm not being racist, those are just facts.

Answer 2

Some liguists theorize that the oldest human genetic root to all people alive today, are the click-speaking Bushmen, and that their style of speech (Clicking), was the first type of Homo sapiens language!

Answer 3

It is a racial difference.  It is neither good nor bad.  What IS bad is The Big Lie that says "race is only skin deep."

Answer 4

You are saying total nonsense. Vocal characteristics are determined by imitation of what is heard, particularly during infancy but can be changed later.

As an exercise listen to French radio. The speakers will be about equally "Blanc, Beurre, and Noir." (European, North African, Central African) Without visual clues, you will not be able to assign speakers to groups better than random probability. They all have the same vocal characteristics when speaking French.

Answer 5

In researching this question, I was unable to find a single article which reports physiological differences in the vocal structures of ethnic groups.  That does not mean that some such differences may not exist.  I can imagine that they might exist in tribes that have remained pure in their gene pool for many centuries.

But for the most part, the primary difference in accents, dialects, and ability to speak a particular language is probably social learning. Some evidence for this exists in the fact that young children (younger than age 5) can learn to speak different languages well, and they are able to make all the pronounciations specific to a language, whether say Russian, Chinese, or English, just fine.  As people who exclusively  speak these languages get older, it becomes very difficult for them to pronounce certain foreign words.  If they could accomplish that feat when they were younger, then the influence must be social learning, not genetic differences in their vocal physiology.  Right?

As far as black people or white people speaking or singing with different accents, this is very likely to be caused by social learning.  They have learned these accents from day 1 in their particular subculture.  And as far as these groups being racial or ethnic groups, they are actually not.  They are mixtures of people from a very wide variety of ethnic backgrounds.

Black people living in the African nations sound totally different than the stereotypical black dialect we hear in the U.S.  And many Blacks in the U.S. have much the same accents as Whites for the area of the U.S. in which they live, especially in the northern U.S.  And have you ever heard Blacks from England with university degrees?  They sound totally British.