Why Do We Have Accents?

Experts who study how science, history, and psychology shape our speech aren't surprised by our natural curiosity about the accents we hear around us. Even more, people often have personal stories about how accents have affected their own lives or those of the people they know. Why do accents matter so much to the stories we tell about who we are and where we’ve been?

Ancient Accents

While many of the specific accents around us today are relatively recent, accents have distinguished speakers far back into human prehistory.

That’s because variability in the way we say things is part of the basic design of language; the way we string sounds together into words naturally causes some changes in how each sound is pronounced, and sometimes the way we hear others pronouncing sounds also leads to small adjustments in how we ourselves say them.

When groups of people who speak the same language become separated for long periods of time, as would have occurred during waves of migrations out of Africa some fifty thousand years ago, the natural pronunciation variations that occur as we talk can go in different directions in different groups, though driven by the same underlying tendencies.

Becoming an accent

Once small pronunciation differences like these accumulate in the speech of separate groups, they become group markers. This linkage between language and group identity occurs as people who frequently interact converge on similar speech patterns. These patterns are then passed down to and intensified by their children and become part of that group’s identity

For instance, think of how the sounds in a word like butter have come to vary in different ways among English speakers, from a Standard Southern British English sounding “Bu-tah” to a more Cockney English sounding “bu’ah,” to, finally, the typical American “Bu-der”—all arising organically from the way sounds are combined in that word.

Once listeners start hearing the variations as indicating social information, where someone is from or what social class they’re in, these pronunciation patterns have become accents.

Over time, without any sustained social contact between groups, accent distinctions and other linguistic differences can accumulate to the point that different dialects morph into separate languages. While the term “accent” refers only to differences in pronunciation, the term “dialect” is broader and can include other types of differences, such as in vocabulary or different ways of structuring sentences.

This is what happened with English and German as they became more and more distinct from the shared ancestral Germanic tongue from which they both evolved, and also what happened with the various Romance languages like Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, and French, all of which descended from Latin.

The mouths of babes

A crucial part of having an accent is that it is socially learned.

All healthy babies are born able to acquire the sounds of any language spoken in the world equally well, but it is the specific input that they hear early in life, even as infants, that determines not just the language they will speak but also the specific accent.

Mother talking and playing with child

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Very early language acquisition starts when hearing a mother’s voice, even before a baby is born, and a baby’s first year involves working out which sounds are used in the language around them. By age 1, babies have narrowed down the sounds of their home language and stop babbling sounds their language doesn’t have.

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But it’s when kids get exposed to other children that an accent really starts to form. While parents are certainly important to the process, it’s a kid’s peer group that has the biggest influence on the way they will sound. This is why children whose parents are not native speakers don’t pick up their parents’ foreign accents but instead end up with the accent of their parents’ new community.

Teen talk

Interestingly, teens who plan to move away from their hometown in adulthood tend to pick up fewer features of their local accent than kids who plan to stay and are socially bound to people and activities that are centered there.

For instance, one study found that college-oriented students known as “jocks” in a high school in Detroit used fewer local Detroit vowel features compared with the students known as “burnouts” who planned to get local jobs and stay in the area after graduation.

The crux is that interaction is the bread and butter of accent; we end up speaking like those we spend the most time with or who share similar experiences, goals, and interests.

Can our accents change?

Linguists find that the accents we acquire in our childhood and adolescence generally persevere into adulthood, even if we move to a new place and live there for a long time. Still, some parts of our speech remain malleable even as we get older.

Picking up new words, like saying “y’all” when you move to the South or “youse” when in Philadelphia, is pretty easy for an adult. Sometimes, adults can also pick up a new pronunciation here and there that may make them sound like they’ve picked up a new accent, like pronouncing “tire” more like “tar” and “bye” like “bah bah” when moving to a place where a Southern American accent is prevalent.

How much a person acquires aspects of a new accent depends on how much time they spend with locals in the new area, as well as their motivation to embrace their new surroundings or keep strong ties to the people and culture back home. Rarely, though, do we find someone who moved in adulthood able to truly sound just like a local.

Embracing accents

The key is that accents are not deviations from some purer form of language. Everyone has an accent that reveals something about who they are.

Some accents are less about the place we grew up and more about things like class, nation, or ethnicity; however, all accents are borne from the same magic mix of fundamental linguistic tendencies we all share as human language speakers and the social drive we all have to show we belong with the people and places that matter to us.

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