How Do Accents Work?

Have you ever wondered how accents work? Tune in to this episode of BrainStuff to find out about the ever-evolving accent.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Welcome to brain stuff from how stuff works. Hey, I'm
Christian Sager and I'm speaking with an American accent. But
where do accents come from? Not just mine, but all
of them? First, let's figure out what an accent is.
Accents are just a part of something bigger called dialects.

(00:24):
An accent refers to the way a person or a
group sounds. A dialect refers to the accent and the
grammatical features inherent in a person's speech. So an accent
is just a way of pronouncing a language. Every single
person speaking has one. Your accent results from how, where,
and when you learn the language you're speaking in, and

(00:45):
it gives impressions about you to other people. No one
has a single fixed accent determined by his or her experience,
because we can and do control the way we speak,
both consciously and unconsciously. In fact, most people chang change
the way they speak depending on who's listening, and our
accents can even change when we have new life experiences.

(01:07):
But where to accents in general come from. Well, primarily
two things isolation and human nature. We're social animals, and
when we're in groups, we like to behave in similar
fashion and show that we belong, and we do this
in multiple ways. Language is no different. When groups become distinct,
the way they speak becomes distinct too. So if a

(01:28):
single group separates socially and geographically, think of Group A
going to one island and group BE going to another,
then over time they develop distinct dialects. They may eventually
even sound like two different languages. Humans are widely traveled species,
and as distinct groups mingled with others, their accents changed,

(01:50):
combining some traits while losing others. No accent is particularly
better than another. While you might hear some folks talk
about accentless in Ish, what they're really talking about our
dialects like received pronunciation or general American, which are the
reference varieties. They're transcribed in dictionaries and often taught to

(02:11):
foreign English students. But they are accents nonetheless, So what
does your accents say about you? It depends on who's listening.
You might have an accent that is associated with a
particular place, like London, for example, but some people may
just associate that with England. And in all languages, some
accents have higher or lower perceived prestige, meaning they are

(02:34):
often associated with a higher social class. For example, Americans
have often looked down on the Southern US accent. The
Southern accent is associated with several stereotypes, but other English speakers,
say in the UK or Australia, might not share the
same prejudice. They will, however, have their own stereotypes about accents,

(02:55):
and these stereotypes won't completely carry over to other English
groups either, So if there's an accent joke in a
British film, your American friends might not get it at all.
These perceptions are not based on anything inherent in the accent.
If you play recordings of different accents to non English speakers,
they won't be able to tell which ones are high
or low prestige. But if you really feel that your

(03:18):
accent isn't working, then the good news is that you
can change it. You'll have to work at it, figure
out exactly how you would like to sound, and then
expose yourself to that as much as possible, but it
is possible. Check out the brainstuff channel on YouTube, and
for more on this and thousands of other topics, visit

(03:39):
how stuff works dot com.