Where do national (?) accents come from?

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So I understand that people from different countries will speak English differently. But how does it work with north / south of a country? Or even districts – like Brooklyn accent?

In my country we don’t have accents. Everyone speaks the same. How come in English people from Yorkshire speak different than people from London?

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5 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

From a local perspective, I’m from Miami, FL and am not of Latin/Hispanic origin nor am I proficient in the Spanish language. Despite this, I have a slight accent that sounds similar to bilingual English speakers because that was the type of English that predominates Miami and what I heard my entire life.

If anyone is into the Hilaria Baldwin scandal… it hit home, lolol.

Anonymous 0 Comments

What country are you from that has no local/regional dialects, and how many speakers does your language have? Languages are “living” constructs; meaning, pronunciation and usage changes to serve a purpose. A Brooklyn accent evolved because population of Brooklyn was different than the population of say New Jersey; different immigrant groups came at a different time, worked and communicated between each other, and by adopting certain forms and rejecting others, developed something that can be considered a local dialect. Unless you speak Latin and live in the Vatican, or are from Monaco and a native Monégasque speaker, I highly doubt your language has no regional differentiation.

Anonymous 0 Comments

It’s essentially the concept of biological evolution, but applied to language and at a smaller scale.

Criteria:

1. Isolation: In evolution, this is separating populations either physically or through some other method that allows the populations to grow independently. Regional differences in language are geographically separated because the populations of people are geographically separated.

2. Time: Small changes over time add up to big changes. Now that the populations are separated, they will start changing slowly over time, but separately from the other populations. After a while, the differences may be very large.

Anonymous 0 Comments

I seen this in reference to Australia when it became a penal colony. Reasoning went like this. People from all over the United Kingdom, all with their own dialects where sent there and forced to intigrate. There where obviously problems in communicating with each other and so they started to use similar sounding words and modified them so all could understand. With more obscure words that did not mesh they basically invented or adobted a new word. Within a relative short time what you get from this the unique Australian accent. That all happened in less than 100 years.

Anonymous 0 Comments

It’s form of evolution, back in the day the working class drank a lot, was very lazy with speech, etc, whereas the higher members of society made an effort to speak clearer, there’s a hint of the common british in irish and there’s a hint of RP in any englishmen, i actually self-taught the really posh british accent and it comes to me naturally now