Why do we talk with different accents depending on what part of the country we come from?

Question

As all of our vocal chords are in the same place & possibly are similar in length why is it that depending on whereabouts in the UK we live the sounds we emit are different?

Answer 1

Its all down to the accents your taught language in as a child. Regional accents grew pretty much as language grows, through isolation. When we used to live in villages with only the horse or chariot for transport there was very little communication among the different areas or villages therefore they used to speak a local language or have a local accent/dialect, these still exist today. Its all very complicated but even with television influencing the evolution of language in the modern world, we still have this isolation influencing our speech, it may disappear over the next few generations as were all moving around much more.

Answer 2

From birth every human being is capable of learning any language spoken by anyone anywhere in the world and of speaking it like a native. Beyond the age of about 8 it becomes harder to learn to speak another language perfectly, so it is a matter of early brain patterning rather than any physical difference.

Surprisingly, perhaps, language has much more to do with our hearing and perception of sounds than with our actual ability to produce the sounds. So long as we have learned to perceive a sound correctly, we will usually be able to make that sound.

By far the most complex sound system is that of vowels. Swedish, for example, has a much larger vowel system than English but contains nearly all the English vowels as a subset, so Swedes can learn to speak English much easier than an English person can learn to speak Swedish. There are some vowels in Swedish which are quite clearly different to a native Swedish speaker yet sound identical to an English ear.

Answer 3

You learn to make sounds from the people speaking around you. There is more to speach than the proper diction of the alphabet; there is music in speach also! Your experience with tones affects how you speak. It depends on how "relaxed" or "proper" your culture is; a more relaxed culture will generally be softer spoken. Finally, distances between cultural groups over the centuries have created different language groups. Different languages can have different alphabets and glottal stops as well as different words. These all affect accent.

Answer 4

each element of america got here up decrease than distinctive worldwide places administration. The North East is largely British on a similar time as the southern familiar factors are French. The western areas got here up decrease than Spain. As we drew at the same time we lost the identifiable accents and have an developed version.

Answer 5

Because you gain an accent through nurture not nature. You are not born with that accent, but becuase you have been brought up with people who talk like that, you start to aswell. So the fact that we all have the same size and length vocal chords has nothing to do with it.

Answer 6

It is also to do with herding and group identification. We all live in communities and each community needs primordially to know its own in time of danger. Its all to do with social bonding and identification is a naturally occurring phenomenon around the globe.

Answer 7

interesting question, i cant claim to know but this is what i think.
the first settlers in a place are likely to influence accent and style of speech.