Have you ever wondered how accents came about? There are so many different accents out there today, I just dont know how they came about.
Think about it, if accents are devloped from those around you, carried on from generation to generation, then who gave the first ever person on earth an accent?!?
What accent did Adam an Eve have?
I'm not talking about different languages now, i'm talking about how the accents came about.
The following information, was found on Wikipedia.com
In linguistics, an accent is a pronunciation characteristic of a particular group of people relative to another group.
Development
Children are able to take on accents at a fast rate; children of traveling families, for example, can change their accents within a short period of time. This generally remains true until a person's early twenties, after which, a person's accent seems to become more entrenched.
History
As human beings spread out into isolated communities, stresses and peculiarities develop. Over time these can develop into identifiable accents. In North America, the interaction of people from many ethnic backgrounds contributed to the formation of the different varieties of North American accents.
It is difficult to measure or predict how long it takes an accent to formulate. Accents in both the USA, Canada and Australia are derived from the British parent accent, yet North American accents remain more distant, either as a result of time or of external or "foreign" linguistic interaction, such as the Italian accent. It could also be argued that the common characteristics of North
American accents are more fairly consistent with the manner in which English was pronounced by people from Britain - most especially people from Western parts of England. Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa (particularly among whites of British-settler descent) are more recent transplants to their destinations so their accents are more-or-less in sync with the way English is spoken in Britain.
In many cases, the accents of non-English settlers from Britain affected the accents of the different colonies quite differently. Irish and Scottish immigrants had accents which greatly affected the vowel pronunciation of certain areas of Australia and Canada.
So, even after I researched this, I still don't know how the first ever human on Earth got an accent, or what accent it was!
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