Origin of accents?

Question

If our ancestors came from different countries, how do we explain the accents we have today like the midwestern, New England, southern, northern, etc

Answer 1

The regional accents of English speakers show great variation across the areas where English is spoken as a first language. This article provides an overview of the many identifiable variations in pronunciation, usually deriving from the phoneme inventory of the local dialect, of the local variety of Standard English between various populations of native English speakers.

Local accents are part of local dialects. Any dialect of English has unique features in pronunciation, vocabulary, and grammar. The term "accent" describes only the first of these, namely, pronunciation. See also: List of dialects of the English language.

Non-native speakers of English tend to carry over the intonation and phonemic inventory from their mother tongue into their English speech. For more details see Non-native pronunciations of English.

Among native English speakers, many different accents exist. Some regional accents are easily identified by certain characteristics. It should be noted that further variations are to be found within the regions identified below; for example, towns located less than 10 miles from the city of Manchester such as Bolton, Oldham and Salford, each have distinct accents, all of which form the Lancashire accent, yet in extreme cases are different enough to be noticed even by a non-local listener. There is also much room for misunderstanding between people from different regions, as the way one word is pronounced in one accent (for example, petal in American English) will sound like a different word in another accent (for example, pearl in Scottish English).

Answer 2

Short version:

Many people from many regions of Europe and elsewhere in the world from different social classes and at different time periods settled in different mixtures within the US. The different mixtures of accents form the basis of modern local and regional accents. But, you have to add in things like education and TV and Americans move alot. This very interesting field is called sociolinguistics.

There was a good book on the history of the English language published in conjunction with PBS which explains the US history of language quiet well. I'm not sure if it's still available.

Answer 3

they are spill overs from the days when we didnt travel much.. before cars people didnt leave the area they lived .... the french influenced the south great and the english influenced the north east and so on. Dialects developed from the melding of the language. We also are affect by accent because of basic speach patterns. Because our is a learned thing. The accent develops from our parents and grandparents and so on... When influence of another language affected our great grand parents it eventually effects us. There are Amish that live very near us.. They have a clearly different accent from me because when growing up. They learn german first their children speak only german until they are 6 or 7. When they learn english they way they pronounce certain words are clearly effected...

there is much more to this hope this helps a little

Answer 4

Society. Well, how society works actually. People tend to copy others actions. Over time, the way someone said something at some time becomes the norm for that region. This can be caused by the persons perception of the way they hear the words or possibly mispronouncing words on purpose. The same thing occurs with "new" words like BLING.

Answer 5

southern accent is the left overs from african slave and spanish. new england is left overs from the English settlers, northern ad midwestern is fa mix of the germanic and northern european languages.

Answer 6

I have 14year old twins. I am from Kent (SE England) and their mother is from Tyneside (NE England). They have always lived in SE England. However, there is a marked difference between them in their pronunciation of words like "bath", "grass" and "castle". Respectively, they are pronounced "barth" & "bath", "grarse" & "gras" and "carsel" & " casel". My daughter has the northern accent and my son the southern.

Answer 7

Those accents are the direct results of our 'ancestors' coming from aorund the owrld. On top of that you have dialects that occur for various and numerous reasons beacues of demographic pressures.

Answer 8

i think of that as quickly as you hear to the southern American accessory, you are able to %. out some similarities to the Yorkshire accessory- the way they drag their vowels and the words they use. lots of the accents sound similar to posh english to me. The Canadian accessory is the main suitable of all of them (sure, i be responsive to it is not American LOL) it has each form of little bits of British right here and there!

Answer 9

some people accentuated the positive
some didn't eliminate the negative
and some messed with mister in-between...