This has always bugged me but i have never looked into it until now.

But i was was wandering if anyone here could explain why accents change and if you are born in a certain area, you have a particular accent.

It may be a simple answer but still, i'd like to understand.

Also, sometimes when you move and reside in a different region for 'X' amount of time your accent changes.

Laymans terms please! :D

Your accent reflects the environment where you learned to speak. Children will have the same accent as their family and friends.

Children will have the same accent as their family and friends.

Kinda guessed that. But what defines a region to have a particular accent is more what i meant. Sorry if that wasn't clear :).

It comes from the residents and immigrants that first settled there. The accents tend to die out when a greater variety of people immigrate, or some industry dies out like tobacco farming or oyster fishing.

Hmmm, interesting.

Would i also be right in saying that, for example, your own accent will change over 'X' amount of time of moving to a new area as you're more exposed to that accent and you un-knowingly pick up that regional accent?.

Would I also be right in saying that, for example, your own accent will change over 'X' amount of time after moving to a new area as you're more exposed to that accent and you un-knowingly pick up that regional accent?That happens with some people but not everyone. Their children will talk like the local people but they might not.

Sometimes people want to blend in, so they deliberately try to copy the speech of their new neighbors. Other people want to retain their original identity, so they carefully avoid changing.

I was born in Chicago, but I spent most of my life in Los Angeles. Nonetheless, I still speak like a Chicagoan. Even though I'm an (amateur) linguist, I wasn't even conscious of most of the differences until later in life. For example, I pronounce "cot" and "caught" differently, but most Californians do not.

"cot" and "caught".

Huh.

Must be a Midwestern thing.

I don't recall noticing it when I lived in AZ. Maybe I should have.

~String

Various factors contribute to accent. For instance, Dutch folk learning English will have a different accent than Spanish or Italian. Whence a group or region enters a language, then, affects accent.

Likewise, economy and environment have their effects. Informally, I once encountered the proposition that a particular accent from the American South was a particular English accent afflicted by tapeworm.

And in that vein, I joke that to figure a Scottish or Irish accent, all you have to do is stand on a hilltop in a wool jacket and trousers, clench your teeth against the cold wind, and try to speak with an English accent.

Poverty and education can have an effect. To the one, a lawyer, doctor, or even classicist is going to have a slight accent because of their practice of Greek, Latin, and public speaking. H. P. Lovecraft, to the other, could write an astounding farm accent that was attributed to white Massachusetts backwoods farmers. Reading it, you would think he was victimizing Appalachian Scots-Irish, but still, it was effective.

Once various factors determine their own outcomes, the accent settles according to habit of immersion and repetition.

In the Pacific northwest, we imagine ourselves without accent. Pretentious, yes, especially given our numbers of German and Scandanavian Lutherans, but students in my day were taught a very flat accent. It is strange to me to hear news anchors in, say, Louisiana sounding just like they do in Seattle. But in Seattle, that accent is somewhat normal; that's part of the reason we pretend to have no accent,

But that is also a boring accent. It takes me five minutes in the South before my speech starts to change. It took a couple days in England. But it usually takes longer for me to drop those variations when I return home.

Of course, I don't speak with an English accent when I'm in England, nor Irish or Scottish in those places. Goddess help me if I ever make it Down Under; that'll take me weeks to drop. Still, though, my accent did change overseas, adopting the local rhythms somewhat and clipping my otherwise flat accent accordingly.

Huh. [Cot-caught] must be a Midwestern thing. I don't recall noticing it when I lived in AZ. Maybe I should have.It's called the cot-caught merger. Rot/wrought, sod/sawed, bobble/bauble, pond/pawned, etc., become homonyms. It occurs in all syllables except when the vowel is followed by R, so star/store and barn/born remain distinguishable.

There are a few Irish and Scottish accents that have the merger, but it's primarily a North American phenomenon. The Wikipedia article (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cot-caught_merger#Cot-caught_merger) has a map showing that the merger has in fact taken place in my birthplace, Chicago, implying that I picked up my unmerged accent somewhere else--but it also shows the merger in southern Arizona and L.A., the only other places where I lived until recently. On the other hand I've seen other articles showing the Midwest to be free of the merger. Apparently the scholarship on this issue is only rudimentary. I certainly know people in Los Angeles who pronounce the vowel in caught with such exaggeration that it's almost a diphthong: koʌt ("koe-uht").
Various factors contribute to accent. For instance, Dutch folk learning English will have a different accent than Spanish or Italian. Whence a group or region enters a language, then, affects accent.There was a huge flow of Scots-Irish immigrants into the Appalachians in the mid-19th century, and it's speculated that the classic "Southern" accent owes some of its phonetic peculiarities to their dialect of English. It's even been hypothesized that they brought the ethnonym "Redneck" with them, from the red scarves they wore around their necks in combat at home, to identify themselves as enemies of the English--although this etymology is not widely accepted.
Likewise, economy and environment have their effects. . . . . I joke that to figure a Scottish or Irish accent, all you have to do is stand on a hilltop in a wool jacket and trousers, clench your teeth against the cold wind, and try to speak with an English accent.These factors play an important role in phonetic evolution.Compare the simplifed phoneme set of Hawaiian to the other Polynesian languages: Samoan salofa becomes Hawaiian aloha, Fijian tabu becomes Hawaiian kapu. Hawaiians spent a good deal of time shouting from one boat to another during long ocean voyages, so there was no room for subtlety in their phonetics. Their only consonants are H-K-L-M-N-P, which are always separated by one vowel and often several. Vowels use a lot more breath than consonants, a dissipation of precious body heat in a northern climate but a way to cool down in the south. So compare the terse, consonant-rich sentences of Icelandic to the languid vowel-rich sentences of Italian--both Western Indo-European languages descended from a common ancestor.
H. P. Lovecraft . . . . could write an astounding farm accent that was attributed to white Massachusetts backwoods farmers. Reading it, you would think he was victimizing Appalachian Scots-Irish, but still, it was effective.It's not easy to transcribe an accent accurately. It's especially difficult in English, since our writing system barely qualifies as phonetic at all, so there are no guidelines for guessing how to pronounce unusual letter combinations.
In the Pacific northwest, we imagine ourselves without accent. Pretentious, yes, especially given our numbers of German and Scandanavian Lutherans, but students in my day were taught a very flat accent. It is strange to me to hear news anchors in, say, Louisiana sounding just like they do in Seattle. But in Seattle, that accent is somewhat normal; that's part of the reason we pretend to have no accent,Just as RP (Received Pronunciation or what we Americans call the "Oxford-BBC accent") is now regarded as "standard" British English, so has the Hollywood-New York radio-TV announcer's accent, cobbled together from the not dissimilar dialects of our country's two original broadcast centers, come to be regarded as "standard" American English. The West Coast, always an olio of migrants from myriad locales, never really developed an accent of its own--not to mention the fact that Hollywood, a Los Angeles neighborhood, contributed to the new standard--so naturally all of us from the Pacific Rim don't hear any difference between the accent on TV and our own speech. Even in my youth 50-60 years ago, children spent almost as much time listening to people on radio and TV as we did to our parents, and today the balance is very lopsided in the other direction. So each generation grows up speaking less of its own regional dialect and more of American (or British, Australian, South African, Indian, etc.) standard.

Add to that the effects of the unprecedented inter-regional migration. Only in the most rural areas are people surrounded by second- and third-generation families who carry forward the regional dialect. In the cities, where most Americans (and as of a couple of years ago most humans everywhere) live, we have friends, neighbors, coworkers, fellow students and even family members from all over the country and indeed all over the world. My housemate's father was an international businessmen and all six of his children were born in different countries.
But that is also a boring accent. It takes me five minutes in the South before my speech starts to change. It took a couple days in England. But it usually takes longer for me to drop those variations when I return home.Most people don't adapt so quickly. You obviously have a rare talent for language, I hope you have a career where you make good use of it.

Huh.

Must be a Midwestern thing.

I don't recall noticing it when I lived in AZ. Maybe I should have.

~String

I've never noticed it either.

I've never noticed it either.Are you folks saying that you don't notice when people pronounce "cot" and "caught" the same, or that you don't notice when they pronounce them differently, or that you don't notice in either case?

It took me a long time to realize that some people pronounce them the same. I'm sure there are others who don't realize that some of us pronounce them differently. It's a fairly subtle difference.

A lot of Americans don't realize that they, themselves, pronounce "bedding" and "betting" identically. Brits pronounce the T and the D, but we turn them both into a flap, like a Spanish R.

Accents do change over time. Even the strongest Scottish accent can soften when living in the South of England. It will soften but still be very Scottish.