How did accents become to be in the UK?

Question

How is that people in different areas have different accents. Where did it all begin and how?

Answer 1

Take the source to be anywhere and move away from it and it will evolve into something different up to a totally different language.
Evolution works in many different ways, you could change the word 'language' at the end of the sentence to 'species'.

Answer 2

Actually, the answer to your question is quite a fascinating journey into human behaviour and development.

To answer fully though, we must first look at case studies conducted on identical twins.

Multiples, particularly identical multiples, tend to develop a private "secret" language all their own. This has baffled researchers for many years, but one theory that supports this is simple Pavlovian conditioning through positive reinforcement. Once child mumbles something seemingly incoherent in connection to an object or event and the other child reinforces this mumble by acknowledging it's meaning and repeating it. Then by a process of simple repetition of these mumbles, a complete language begins to form.

Bering this simple conditioning theory in mind, let's take a step back in time to the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam (today New York City) sometime between 1614 and 1665. As English settlers began to filter into the colony, the children began hearing stories of St. Nicholas from the Dutch children. With the thick Dutch accent, what the English children heard was not Saint Nicholas, but Sant Neek-a-laas or Santy Ca-lause". Through reinforcement and repetition, this misunderstood name became the new name "Santa Clause" that we all know today.

So it is fairly easy to theorize that through contact with other societies, mistranslations, misunderstood words and even just for fun, we can develop and integrate new words, phrases and accents (methods of pronouncing certain words) into our current vernacular and, if used frequently over time, become a permanent member of our regional lexicon.

Answer 3

Accents began a long time before the UK. In the Old Testament ssome bunch of israelites wanted to weed out their regional enemies and hit on the idea of demanding they say "shibboleth" and he said "sibboleth". With regional differences there are regional accents everywhere. Nothing special about the UK in this regard.

Answer 4

Like all countries, the UK is made up of regional as well as national histories. Over time, many different languages and dialects have come to the UK with their invading cultures. As these mixtures of Danish, French, Gaelic, etc all mixed, they produced certain regional variations in pronunciation and word usage.

Answer 5

Its not just this country ,every country in the world has regional accents, it comes about because conquerors were more prelevant in some areas than others, and every country has had them

Answer 6

The answer to you question started with English itself. The country was invaded by Angles, Saxons and Jutes. the Saxons took the southern part of the country, any county with SEX in it (Essex = east Saxons) the Jutes are the folk in Norfolk (north Folk) and the Angles, in Anglia and the midlands.

Then the Saxon kings got together and invaded north. conquering North Humber Land.

Alfred the Great was the first king of all England, making Aenglish, the Saxon language of the Angles the national language. However, he only became the big cheese by defeating the new conquerors, the Danes. they now held the eastern sea-board from Scotland to London, and were paid in gold to stay peaceful. They had a similar language, but with different grammar, so they dropped the endings of words to trade. thus we lost our male, female and neuter endings to the words.

with Viking (Norwegian) and Norman invasion, more languages were in common use, and they too were incorporated into the English by dropping the grammatical endings.

some words like chair reflect the age of the design, with the Germanic (Saxon) stool being used for the most basic design, Bench (Danish) and Chair (french)...

In England, the main accent groupings are between the south and the north. The prestige or posh English accent is known as Received Pronunciation (RP) that is thought to have its roots in the educated language of south-eastern England. It’s more commonly known as the Southern English accent, and for a long time was the sole accent used on the BBC

The accent spoken in the east end of London is called Cockney. But a similar sounding English, called Estury English (Thames Estury) accent is quite widespread in many parts in Southern England too. Rural accents, those not altered by the mixture of peoples during the Industurial age - The West Country - East Anglia retain thier ancient roots, however cities like Bristol, Birmingham, Manchester (Mancunian), Leeds, Sheffield, and particularly Newcastle (Geordie), have rather different accents of thier own. These were created over time. The Birmingham accent is among the most difficult accents for foreign visitors to understand.

Liverpool also has a unique accent of its own which is called the Scouse - caused by the traces of the Irish accents which emigrated to the city. It is only within the last 15 years that television channels starting using broadcasters who speak English with regional accents - where in the past it was dominated by the Queen’s English only.

There was a fantastic Survey of English Dialects - the brainchild of Harold Orton at Leeds University and Eugen Dieth from the University of Zurich. It remains the only systematic survey of our native dialects. By the late 1940s, Orton and Dieth thought it vital to survey spoken English because, they believed, the linguistic landscape of post-war Britain would be drastically altered by increased social and geographical mobility and by wider access to broadcast media and education.

From 1950 to 1961, a team of fieldworkers collected data in 313 localities. Their findings, published between 1962 and 1971, continue to be used by linguists worldwide. Underpinning the survey were 1300 questions designed to elicit responses that would best illustrate the lexical, phonological and morphological diversity of spoken English. The questionnaire was arranged in nine books, covering such topics as the farm, the human body and social activities.

Locations were selected according to a number of criteria. Almost all were rural, since small communities in isolated areas with historically stable populations were considered most likely to preserve traditional dialects. Urban areas were intended for inclusion later, but that plan was abandoned on economic grounds. Criteria for choosing contributors were crucial to the goal of comparability. Two or three people were interviewed in most locations. Priority was given to older males: there is a considerable body of statistical evidence suggesting men are more likely to use the vernacular.

They were usually aged 60 or over, preferably born of native parents, "with good mouths, teeth and hearing" and "of the social class from whom the most representative local speech could be obtained."
Advances in audio technology during the 1950s made it increasingly possible, and indeed desirable, to record informal conversations on site. Several locations were revisited to record original contributors or replacements with similar profiles, a process that continued until 1974. Interviews were unscripted and unrehearsed, encouraging speakers to use their normal speech forms. The 288 Surveys of English Dialects site recordings are now held in the British Library Sound Archive.

Answer 7

once the english language was invented and people were speaking it, people were being shipped in and out of england as slaves and travellers, they needed to learn english and they had their original languages as well so it just kind of formed because they added in their own phrases and wording. hope this helps x