Current Events > This may be a really dumb question, but it's 4:30am the day after Christmas

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Why are there accents from native English speakers across the world? Here in just America was have some. All over England they have certain ones. Why is this?

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I think there are different dialects in most languages. Its just how it ends up.

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Effectively the main reason is geographic isolation meant people start talking differently. This may seem kinda strange in the modern day with internet and television, but very few people actively travelled between say the US and Europe so the way people talk began differing.

Similarly social isolation plays an effect. You may have heard that black people across the USA are more likely to have an accent similar to each other than compared to white people who live relatively close to them. Same principles apply.

One study found that a group of 50 people over wintering in the Antarctic began to develop their own accent to when pronunciations of words were compared before and after the six months.

One interesting question is whether accents may break down a bit with modernisation and technology, but with people stuck in staunch nationalism and tribalism that may never really happen

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That is interesting. I think I should read up on it a bit more, tbh

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Not to mention that the standard American accent is very similar to the original English accent.

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