Eli5: How do accents come about, like in the uk within 4 miles of each other there could be 5 different accents
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People didnt travel that much. After living for a long time together, you develop certain quirks in the way you communicate with people you say every day. Certain pronunciations, phrases and words only you understand. Stack this process over the span of centuries and you get different accents.
If you want a spicy take: accents and dialects are real, languages are not.
Everyone has an accent, and everyone speaks in at least one dialect. What’s weird is that some accents and dialects were promoted, through political pressure, to “languages” and then the other related dialects were considered inferior or informal or variants of that language.
“A language is a dialect with an army and a navy” as Max Weinrich put it.
Isolation. 4 miles is a long distance if there’s a giant mountain range separating the towns. For most of history, people didn’t travel much between communities and therefore accents could “drift”, and become unique.
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