like people in southeren kentucky and iowa speak really different
2007-01-13 11:55:47 · 9 answers · asked by Anonymous in Arts & Humanities ➔ History
Accents develop because of isolation. You might think that there is a lot of movement between areas but there isn't. Most people wouldn't travel more than 200km from the place they were born in their lifetimes and many a lot less than that. When people in one area speak to each other all the time, variations occur that do not occur in the next place. Over time these variations become accents. If the isolation continues, the accents become dialects and even separate languages. All the different languages in the world are caused by isolation and local development.
2007-01-13 12:09:52 · answer #1 · answered by tentofield 7 · 1⤊ 1⤋
People immigrated from all over the world and learned English with their individual accents. Then their American born children learned English from their parents and teachers all who may have had different accents. So a first generation child growing up in Brooklyn would be speaking English which was a mix of Irish, Polish, Yiddish, and various other European accents. A child in Minnesota may have heard only Dutch, German and Scandinavian accents. A child in Alabama would have heard French, African dialects and Portugese. After a few generations the accents develop even further apart from each other across the country till Brooklyn and Alabama sound like 2 different languages. That's what makes language and and accents so interesting.
2007-01-13 21:13:31 · answer #2 · answered by Heavy Reader 1 · 1⤊ 0⤋
America is a big place. England by comparison is small, but there are many different British accents. People came to this country from all over the world when it was founded and every day since then too, we were bound to end up with many diverse dialects... I like to hear people from Maine and Cajuns the most, although that twangy mid western accent cracks me up too!
2007-01-13 20:05:53 · answer #3 · answered by eggman 7 · 1⤊ 0⤋
Many nationalities settled together in a particular area and the accents of the motherland stuck around. Like, a lot a Scots and British settled in Georgia and many words assoiciated with the south are actually a Scottish version of English, like "yella" and other accented words.
2007-01-13 20:08:31 · answer #4 · answered by Christina H 2 · 1⤊ 0⤋
That is true. Different nationalities, mainly European, settled in specific sections of the US. As these people learned English, they enriched (or changed) the King's English until it became American English. In the process, certain dialects were developed, such as southern, midwestern, etc. Bottom line, it's still a good method of communicating with other people.
2007-01-13 20:02:36 · answer #5 · answered by Marilyn S 4 · 3⤊ 0⤋
It's one of the joys of America. It's also not any different than people in other countries - the UK, for instance, has numerous different accents, as do Germany and Spain.
2007-01-13 20:03:41 · answer #6 · answered by Anonymous · 2⤊ 0⤋
well people have different accecnts mostly because thats what america is -different people . people from all over the world and they come to live here . if you look back to when america became '' america'' people came from the england , scotland , china japan just everywhere..
2007-01-13 20:41:54 · answer #7 · answered by brittney b 1 · 0⤊ 1⤋
Mutts from all over the world in one place, breeding together.
2007-01-13 20:03:19 · answer #8 · answered by day by day 6 · 2⤊ 0⤋
it might be because different regions started out under different national foreign control. florida-spain, louisiana-french, new york had dutch influence... this might be a factor that influenced their accents.
2007-01-13 20:03:06 · answer #9 · answered by Milo T 2 · 3⤊ 0⤋