How did different languages and accents come about?

Answer 1

It's hard to say whether there was originally just one language or many languages, although linguistic evidence points to there having been many languages that developed simultaneously originally. One of them was Proto-Indo-European. This language was spoken by many peoples, and as these people became separated from each other by geographic and cultural borders across Asia and Europe, the language of each group evolved in a different direction. Hence, the people in one area, say India, who were somewhat removed from the people of another, slowly changed the meanings and pronunciation of words, while other people, for example those in northern Europe, did the same thing.

In other words, the language evolved into various accents and dialects due to geographical separation. This is the same way different populations of animals or plants evolve into different species when they are geographically separated for a long enough time.

Eventually, these separate dialects became separate languages related to a common ancestral language. And eventually, some of the people who spoke some of these languages realized it would be useful if they could keep a visual record of some of the words they spoke - to keep track of goods purchased and sold, for example. So they invented various systems of writing. People in one area may have invented a syllabary - a kind of writing using a single written symbol to represent a syllable. Others used pictorial representations of entire words. Still others invented an alphabet - where a single written symbol represents a single sound. The symbols they chose to represent that sound, syllable, or word were completely arbitrary: someone literally decided to make all the symbols straight up and down or angled with sharp angles (as in the Phoenecian alphabet) or curvy with curls and tails (as in the Arabic alphabet). As languages and dialects changed, the written language also evolved right along with them. This is why there are spelling differences as well as grammatical differences between British English and American English, for example.

And it's all thanks linguistic evolution; the more people change, the more their language does.

Answer 2

Whenever a language community is divided into two communities, they begin to change away from one another. Over time, if they are not in contact with one another, they change from each other enough that they become two different languages. This process takes about 500 years. Starting about 100,000 years ago or so, the earliest human language began to diverge into different dialects and then into different languages. This process has been proceeding for the last 100K years until we have the language situation we have today with about 6000 different languages spoken in the world.

Answer 3

It depends on what you believe. The Christian faith says that it happened at the Tower of Babbel. God was furious that they were going to build this tower all the way to heaven and so he made everyone speak a different language so that they could not communicate. I think it would be better if he had just toppled the tower. But I guess you would have to believe the story.

Answer 4

"tower of babble

a long time ago, these guys wanted to reach heaven, so they attempted to build a tower to reach heaven. God didn't allow it so He punished the guys by making them talk babble so they wouldn't communicate. It's in the Bible."

This is correct, but different accents came about when people started learning other languages and speak them like their native lingo.

Answer 5

this is truly a question i could like to nicely known the answer to aswell! even yet it does not truly make experience for us to have in some unspecified time interior the destiny all come from the comparable place, in case you communicate how distinctive each and all of the worldwide's languages are, no longer in user-friendly terms in terms of conversing, yet in addition the written language too. Alot of the cultural element of those distinctive races of persons and their langauges is in keeping with their surrounding, the ambience they grew up in, case in point, residing in China, would be thoroughly distinctive to starting to be up in England, or Greece or everywhere. as a result, those first people who've began the language, won't be able to have come from the comparable place, as each and each u . s . a . has a distinctive historic past history. nicely, a minimum of this is how my good judgment can clarify it..

Answer 6

tower of babble

a long time ago, these guys wanted to reach heaven, so they attempted to build a tower to reach heaven. God didn't allow it so He punished the guys by making them talk babble so they wouldn't communicate. It's in the Bible.

Answer 7

the tower of Babel in the Bible explains it