Speaker 1: Welcome to brain stuff from how stuff works. Hey, I'm
Speaker 1: Christian Sager and I'm speaking with an American accent. But
Speaker 1: where do accents come from? Not just mine, but all
Speaker 1: of them? First, let's figure out what an accent is.
Speaker 1: Accents are just a part of something bigger called dialects.
Speaker 1: An accent refers to the way a person or a
Speaker 1: group sounds. A dialect refers to the accent and the
Speaker 1: grammatical features inherent in a person's speech. So an accent
Speaker 1: is just a way of pronouncing a language. Every single
Speaker 1: person speaking has one. Your accent results from how, where,
Speaker 1: and when you learn the language you're speaking in, and
Speaker 1: it gives impressions about you to other people. No one
Speaker 1: has a single fixed accent determined by his or her experience,
Speaker 1: because we can and do control the way we speak,
Speaker 1: both consciously and unconsciously. In fact, most people chang change
Speaker 1: the way they speak depending on who's listening, and our
Speaker 1: accents can even change when we have new life experiences.
Speaker 1: But where to accents in general come from. Well, primarily
Speaker 1: two things isolation and human nature. We're social animals, and
Speaker 1: when we're in groups, we like to behave in similar
Speaker 1: fashion and show that we belong, and we do this
Speaker 1: in multiple ways. Language is no different. When groups become distinct,
Speaker 1: the way they speak becomes distinct too. So if a
Speaker 1: single group separates socially and geographically, think of Group A
Speaker 1: going to one island and group BE going to another,
Speaker 1: then over time they develop distinct dialects. They may eventually
Speaker 1: even sound like two different languages. Humans are widely traveled species,
Speaker 1: and as distinct groups mingled with others, their accents changed,
Speaker 1: combining some traits while losing others. No accent is particularly
Speaker 1: better than another. While you might hear some folks talk
Speaker 1: about accentless in Ish, what they're really talking about our
Speaker 1: dialects like received pronunciation or general American, which are the
Speaker 1: reference varieties. They're transcribed in dictionaries and often taught to
Speaker 1: foreign English students. But they are accents nonetheless, So what
Speaker 1: does your accents say about you? It depends on who's listening.
Speaker 1: You might have an accent that is associated with a
Speaker 1: particular place, like London, for example, but some people may
Speaker 1: just associate that with England. And in all languages, some
Speaker 1: accents have higher or lower perceived prestige, meaning they are
Speaker 1: often associated with a higher social class. For example, Americans
Speaker 1: have often looked down on the Southern US accent. The
Speaker 1: Southern accent is associated with several stereotypes, but other English speakers,
Speaker 1: say in the UK or Australia, might not share the
Speaker 1: same prejudice. They will, however, have their own stereotypes about accents,
Speaker 1: and these stereotypes won't completely carry over to other English
Speaker 1: groups either, So if there's an accent joke in a
Speaker 1: British film, your American friends might not get it at all.
Speaker 1: These perceptions are not based on anything inherent in the accent.
Speaker 1: If you play recordings of different accents to non English speakers,
Speaker 1: they won't be able to tell which ones are high
Speaker 1: or low prestige. But if you really feel that your
Speaker 1: accent isn't working, then the good news is that you
Speaker 1: can change it. You'll have to work at it, figure
Speaker 1: out exactly how you would like to sound, and then
Speaker 1: expose yourself to that as much as possible, but it
Speaker 1: is possible. Check out the brainstuff channel on YouTube, and
Speaker 1: for more on this and thousands of other topics, visit
Speaker 1: how stuff works dot com.