Accents are strange things.
A language can be spoken using the exact same words but in hundreds of different ways.
Sometimes accents are so dissimilar that two speakers of the same language with different
accents can’t even understand one another.
We’ve had accents for thousands of years.
The Bible speaks of a tribe that identified their enemies by the fact that they couldn’t
correctly pronounce the word “shibboleth”.
So they basically killed everyone with a funny accent.
Nice.
But it’s not just humans that have accents.
Animals also tweet, bahh and moo differently depending on where they come from.
The UK is well known for its large and varied array of regional accents.
A study in the UK found that cows in England moo differently in different parts of the
country.
Their moo’s seemed to somewhat reflect the accent of their owner.
But what actually causes accents?
Let’s find out.
Humans have a remarkable talent for being able to quickly detect an accent.
We’re actually really, really good at it.
Humans can detect if someone has a different accent from themself after just 30 milliseconds
of speech.
We can even do the same thing if we listen to that 30ms of speech played backwards on
a recording.
Well done brain, you’re smarter than you look.
So where does this superhuman, accent-divining power come from?
It all starts from when we’re only an itty-bitty little baby.
Humans aren’t just inherently good at learning language; it’s a lot simpler than that.
During our first few years we’re hyper-receptive to noises around us.
We quickly learn to imitate those noises.
Babies subconsciously listen in to people’s conversations around them and so that’s
what the child learns to imitate, those people’s languages and speech patterns.
Just because a baby is born to Spanish parents in Spain it doesn’t mean that Spanish is
destined to be its native tongue.
If that newborn Spanish baby is placed in say, England, from birth, adopted by English
parents, it will grow up speaking fluent English.
Not only that, it will have an English accent, not Spanish.
In fact this noise imitation goes further than we initially thought.
During a study bird noises were played to an infant child, soon afterwards the child
was able to accurately imitate those bird noises.
But children quickly lose this ability to effortlessly reproduce noises, as they grow
up.
That’s why it’s significantly harder for an adult to learn a new language than a child.
But that doesn’t mean you can’t change your accent.
It’s significantly harder to do so as you grow up, but when an adult moves to a new
area, they do slowly lose their accent in favour of a new one.
Although this can take several years.
A famous example of this is when Britain colonised America.
Over several years the settlers lost their traditional Queen’s English accent in favour
of, well the American accent, specifically southern drawl.
The English gave America words like “y’all” but that’s more of a dialect issue than
an accent.
It’s believed that accents are formed because of variations in the physical makeup of different
ethnicities.
Different ethnic groups are born with different shaped noses, mouths and throats; these subtle
differences alter the way that words are formed.
For example a group of people with slightly wider than average throats, bigger noses and
larger chests will speak in a deeper pitch.
On the other hand, people with a narrower throat, smaller nose and smaller chest will
speak with a more nasally and higher pitched accent.
This can been seen with individuals of East-Asian origin.
Due to their smaller than average body frames they tend to sound higher-pitched when speaking
English than Caucasians, who will say the exact same words but typically in a deeper
voice.
But that’s not the only reason we have accents.
Physical variations such as this only have subtle effects on our accent.
The factors most responsible for different accents are influences from different languages
and cultures.
Specifically the mixing of those different languages and cultures.
Humans like to explore and it’s because of our explorative nature that different regions
have different accents.
For example, when the Germanic people came to Britain in the 5th century they brought
their language and culture with them.
Over time this changed the way people in England spoke, creating new accents.
Because people from all kinds of different regions and cultures came to Britain, today
Britain has an estimated 56 different major accents across the country.
That’s a hell of a lot for the relatively small island that it is.
For that you can thank the huge wealth of other countries the UK is parked next to.
The location where the overseas settlers first came ashore and made their home determined
what accent that region of Britain would ultimately have.
Britain’s a great example but this exact same reasoning holds true for any country
that has different accents, which is most countries.
You may be wondering what’s the difference between an accent and a dialect?
An accent is the way one sounds when speaking; it’s the unique way in which people pronounce
words and the musicality, if you like, of their voice.
A dialect however, refers to the linguistic system as a whole, particularly the grammatical
features of the way a person talks.
To put all that more simply, a dialect is what people say and an accent is the way they
say it.
As for me?
Well I have a west Lancashire accent, which is why I my accent doesn’t sound like the
traditional plummy boarding school type accent, which people from around the world usually
associate with England.
That accent by the way, which some people simply refer to as “Queen’s English”
is actually called “Received Pronunciation”.
America has a similar, so called “general, accent-less accent”.
It’s called “General American” it’s a mix of Midwest and west coast accents.
Received Pronunciation and General American are often regarded as the standard accent-less
accents of the English language, but this is not true.
There is no such thing as “not having an accent”.
Even Received Pronunciation and General American themselves are accents.
So to summarise, we have accents because humans like to explore and when two different cultures
come together in the same location the unique ways in which they both talk get amalgamated
into a brand new accent.