Why People Have Different Regional Accents

Arran Lomas of Thoughty2 offered an interesting explanation regarding the origination and propagation of regional accents.

Accents are strange things. A language can be spoken using the exact same words but in hundreds of different ways. Sometimes accents are so dissimilar that two speakers of the same language with different accents can't even understand one another.

Lomas explained that accents are developed during childhood. An infant will hear specific ways of speaking and will then mimick that sound when first attempting speech. This, in combination with specific physical attributes that affect tone and timbre, explains how accents are propagated generationally. But the origin of accents is a bit more tricky, although Lomas sums it up quite nicely.

So to summarize, we have accents because humans like to explore and when two different cultures come together in the same location the unique ways in which they both talk get amalgamated into a brand new accent.

via Boing Boing