BrainStuff Classics: How Do Accents Work?

Everybody has an accent -- some are just considered neutral by native speakers. Learn how accents develop and how they influence us in this episode of BrainStuff.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Welcome to brain Stuff from How Stuff Works. Hey, brain Stuff,
Lauren voc obam here with another classic episode from our
erstwhile host, Christian Sagar. This episode sets out to answer
a question that lots of us around the office, having
backgrounds in theater, We're curious about how do accents work? Hey,

(00:25):
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.
An accent refers to the way a person or a
group sounds. A dialect refers to the accent and the

(00:46):
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 lane which you're speaking in,
and it gives impressions about you to other people. No
one has a single fixed accent determined by his or

(01:07):
her experience, because we can and do control the way
we speak, both consciously and unconsciously. In fact, most people
change the way they speak depending on who's listening. And
our accents can even change when we have new life experiences.
But where to accents in general come from. Well, primarily
two things isolation and human nature. We're social animals, and

(01:31):
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
single group separates socially and geographically, think of Group A
going to one island and Group BE going to another,

(01:52):
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,
combining some traits while losing others. No accent is particularly
better than another. While you might hear some folks talk

(02:14):
about accentless English, 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 foreign English students,
But they are accents nonetheless, So what does your accents
say about you? It depends on who's listening. You might

(02:36):
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 often associated
with a higher social class. For example, Americans have often
looked down on the Southern US accent. The Southern accent

(02:58):
is associated with several real 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,
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.

(03:21):
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
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

(03:41):
expose yourself to that as much as possible, but it
is possible. Today's episode was written by Ben Bolan and
produced by Tyler Klang. From more on this and lots
of other topics, visit our home planet, how Stuff Works
dot com