Why are there such things as accents?

Answer 1

People learn how to speak from other people that they talk to, such as first and foremost their parents, but also the friends and neighbors, school teachers, etc. But people form communities, and people within a given community talk mostly to each other. This makes possible what is formally known as linguistic drift. Human beings are not by nature all that precise. We tend to change things just because we are not paying that much attention to fine details of what we are doing. If people start to pronounce things slightly differently in their own community, they don't notice it, this just becomes the accepted norm for their region. Meanwhile different regions develop their own variations. Eventually you get regional accents.

More on accentsFirst, someone's having an "accent" is a subjective thing. My Mom was French, and for Americans had a French accent when she spoke. My Dad was from New York, and had an American accent to his English. Yet, to me as a child, they had no accents; this was just how they spoke.

Everyone has an accent. In England, there are dozens of regional accents. Same with the US and everywhere else. In the north of Italy, the accent is different from the south.

Some accents are geographical. People separated by distance evolve their own ways of pronouncing words, which become greater with time. An example of this is Canadian French and Parisian French, or British English and American English. In the case of American English, the accent(s) were affected by other languages used in North America: Amerindian, German, French, Spanish and more. Since these influences didn't affect British English at the time, the accents moved apart.

Some accents are learned on purpose. In almost every country, there are ways of speaking which are considered "educated" or "uneducated"; "upper-class" or "lower-class". People change their accents depending on which group they want to be associated with.

Some accents are taught. Many people in the world speak English with a British accent, simply because their teachers were British and that's what they heard. One is not better than another; they are just different.

In this last case, second language pronunciation is affected by the person's first language. A Spanish person speaking Japanese sounds different from a Russian speaking Japanese.

A person's accent can change over time, depending on where they are living and the people they speak with regularly. Accents are also being changed by television, where people listen and unconsciously imitate what they hear.

Answer 2

Accents develop due to historical, social, and geographical factors that influence how languages are spoken in specific regions or among certain groups of people. They are a natural part of language evolution and can help to identify a person's background or origin.