We all know an accent when we hear it. We know that usually when the person comes from somewhere very far away if the accent is extremely different. We can sometimes even tell accents in writing (Color vs. Colour, etc). So how do accents form? What are some of the factors that promote the change? Can't we all just get along?

One must remember that Language is always changing. And if you don't believe me, think about any movie you've seen that was made in the '80s and then any movie you've seen from the '50s. There are a lot of factors that affect change. Society changes all the time. Think about taboos that existed two hundred years ago (I assume since you didn't live in that era, that you have to just remember what you've been told), and then think of what changes probably took place and how those affected how we speak. Language itself is a fashion. How many people have changed their vocabulary and pronunciation to some of their idols?

Now there are plenty of reasons for accents and changes. Now that we know language changes (and we do), we can look at how an accent is formed. Let's make up a scenario where we have a made up language. Let's call this language A (and people A who speak it). Let's say that people A are nomads but half of the group decides to settle down in a valley (we'll that group, B), and the other half in a mountainous area (we'll call that group, C). Now, they are for all intensive purposes isolated. Now in the next generation, the people of group B and C won't have known each other.

And as the generations go by, the language will change, but they won't change in the same way at the same time. So in say 10 generations, they might be speaking something that is in all practical sense two different languages. Now they will be related, through language A, but language B will probably have slightly different grammar and/or morphology from Language C (and A). Now some may think that 10 generations isn't that long, but remember that we are assuming these peoples don't interact.

How might they be different, you wonder? Well, the vocabulary is one way. The people in the valley will encounter different creatures than the people in the mountainous area and thusly have different words for those things. Then they might use those different animals for different religious or metaphorical reasons, and then start making idioms and proverbs based on them. So it is Isolation which is one of the key components to the reasons for accents.

Now let's look at English. We have many thousands of dialects (and more if you count ideolects) across the English speaking world. English used to be only on the Island of England (and probably Ireland) for a long time. Then America was colonized and what is more isolating than an ocean?!?!?!?!? So American dialects changed and were formed, and so did the British ones (not that there was a standard British dialect to begin with but that's a different article completely) and thusly we started changing to the point where in a few more generations we could actually have been speaking different languages (some already think we do). Australia has the same issue, as well as any region that speaks any language.

But these days we have another player which is affecting the game, and in fact probably reversing it: the Media and technology like it. This is why I said We could have been speaking different languages in another few generations. We have television, radio, music, and culture which is merging and mixing and developing a more universal dialect. But we have a conflict because there still is isolation causing change away from uniformity and then we have media causing it to come back into uniformity. So we are in a dialectal tug of war to say. We'll have to see what happens in the next couple of generations to know for sure what changes shall occur (judging we don't blow ourselves up from some sort of nuclear war....)

Timothy