ACCENTS - How did the Southern accent come about? What about New York accent?

Question

How can I find out more about accent origination?

Answer 1

Great question! I'm a linguist, and this question is EXACTLY what linguists study. In fact, it falls under the subfield of linguistics called sociolinguistics.

If you want to study linguistics in college, there are many colleges that offer linguistics program.

A general answer to your question is that languages change all the time, including their pronunciation. Sometimes different groups of people's language will change in different ways, eventually causing those groups to have different accents. Over time, this process has created many different dialects of basically all languages.

You can certainly learn more about this online by studying Wikipedia articles about things like "language", "dialect", "sociolinguistics", "language variation and change" and so on. Here is the website of the Telsur project, which studies the accents of North American English and documents which pronunciations are used in which areas:
http://www.ling.upenn.edu/phono_atlas/home.html
You might also find this website interesting:
http://accent.gmu.edu/

You might also see if your local library has a copy of a movie called "American Tongues", which is a documentary that talks about these issues. There was also a PBS special a few years ago called "Do You Speak American?" that might be interesting to you.

Of course you can always get a hold of books on linguistics and sociolinguistics and study on your own. I personally find it fascinating! One book that's easy for laypeople to understand is called "Language Myths" by Trudgill and Bauer.

Feel free to send me a message if you'd like to ask more on this topic!

P.S. No offense to the answerers below, but most of these answers are incorrect. There are many misunderstandings out there about differences between dialects. The sources I have listed above will help you get a good foundation.

Answer 2

Accents come about by isolation. If people don't mix with outsiders, and most of us don't, then our community starts to develop its own accent. As the differences become greater, the accents become dialects and the dialects become languages. We see dialect chains developing in many countries. Each accent and dialect is completely comprehensible to the one next door but there are variations. At the ends of the chains the dialects are mutually incomprehensible and are, effectively, different languages. This can be seen in the UK, Fiji and many other countries.

Young countries are starting to develop accents now. This is happening in Australia. It is already easy to pick someone from Adelaide. In the next 100 years, all the major cities will be distinguishable.

We learn our accent in the schoolyard from our peers, not from our parents or television.

Answer 3

I suspect that the "New York accent" emerged as a result of the influence of Russian-Jewish and Italian immigrants. It is hard for someone who speaks Russian or Italian to switch to English because many sounds of the English language do not exist in Russian and Italian. Their mispronunciations of English words resulted in the emergence of the "New York accent".

.

Answer 4

Interesting question. It has to do with the region and time that most people there migrated. I think that in the South most people there are from the North of England, Scotland and France, whereas in NYC people came from Holland and other various places.

Answer 5

Someone once told me that the North American Southern dialect is closer to old English as evidenced in words such as "yonder" but I don't know if there's any truth to this.

Answer 6

new york accent is the last stronghold of proper English in the US.

the southern twang I know nothing as wherefrom it came about.

I supose it....