Like New York alone has a few different ones, so does England depending on what state or area within the country you’re from. Why is this?
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Simply because people tend to stay in the same place for their entire childhood and they thus grow up speaking similarly to the people around them. Accents don’t tend to change all that much once you become an adult, even if you *do* move somewhere else, which is why they’re still a thing even in today’s world where travel between regions is far more common than it was even a hundred years ago.
Most likely by having a history of not much travel or clearly defined borders in their country. Look at Italy for instance. There were times in the past where Italy was divided into 5 separate countries. This could easily allow for distinct cultures to develop all within the area we now consider to be the Italian peninsula.
South African here. It’s also because of what your first language is and who taught you English. People taught English by English speaking people sound very different to those that were taught English by people who are Afrikaans, zulu, xhosa etc. Who, in turn, also sound different from each other. For example, my mom grew up during apartheid, so she was taught English by primarily zulu speaking teachers. I went to an English speaking school so my English sounds way different. My Afrikaans friends went to Afrikaans schools so their English also sounds different. Etc, etc
This is a really good question. I’ve noticed this in other countries but as an Australian there are surprisingly no differing accents. Some people sound more “country” I guess but you can’t tell which part of the country someone is from unlike in USA/ UK
I’ve always been fascinated by how this works. It’s almost counterintuitive to the way you might predict it works. You might think that in the UK, having a long history of being a very densely populated country, might have a homogenized accent due to more generations of like: a dude marrying a gal from the next town over where they talk a bit different, and their kid ending with an accent that’s a little in-between. But the UK has a million different regional accents. And it’s kinda the same pattern in the US in terms of the more densely populated eastern portion of the country having more variation in accent than the west.
You would think that the longer lots of people have been living in close proximity to each other, the less variation in accent there would be, but it apparently doesn’t always work like that.
It’s mostly age. Age and population density. Accents take time to differentiate, and it happens when there are a lot of people talking to each other.
The UK has a lot of accents because there’s been a lot of people living here continuously for thousands of years. Australia doesn’t have so many accents because it wasn’t heavily populated until recently, and the population density is still low.
There would have been more accents from the many indigenous australian groups, but most of those groups got wiped out so their accents aren’t around so much.
Fun fact: the Pidgin “slang” in Hawaii originated from plantation workers in the past.
Hawaii had many plantation workers from many Asian countries, Filipinos, Japanese, native Hawaiians, etc. The only common language they spoke was English, very broken English.
Over time their use of broken English as a common way to communicate became a language itself.
“Most countries”? I am from a small village with a few hundred inhabitants in Central Europe. And two villages over they have already a different dialect. Don’t get me started on the next city, or next province. We can’t even agree on a words for many common things, every region has their own (same official language though).
It’s like this almost anywhere in the world. Dialects are a universal thing in humans. Also you used “accents” wrongly.
In the case of United States, have you seen how big we are? Europe is a comparable size and it has multiple languages oppose to accents. It’s honestly more surprising that the main language is English and not more mixed
Because people were socially isolated in ways that prevented verbal speech between that area and the ones with other speech. Sometimes this was geographic isolation, sometimes it was socioeconomic. In NYC a primary factor was the concentrations of different immigrant groups in different areas.
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