Ever wondered where your accent came from?

Sophie Reynish.

Accents. They're a weird thing. Both my parents are Welsh, my mums partner is Scottish and my dad's partner is Slovak so, I pretty much live around different accents each day and it gets me wondering WHY?  Why are there different accents? Where did they come from? Who had the first accent and where did he get it from?

A person's accent shows their regional and social groups. Although nowadays, its less common for people to live in one place their whole lives so this results in 'mixed' accents, a hybrid, and so it becomes harder to identify people in that way. Usually if a person moves somewhere where there is a different common accent, they adopt some norms of pronunciation used by the new community in order to be accepted and respected.

Received Pronunciation, also known as 'the Queen's English' or 'BBC English', can be an indicator of their educational background and it soon became an indicator of a good educational background and high position in society. RP is the only accent that is taught to foreigners and so it is widely used abroad. There are more foreign speakers of RP than mother-tongue users in Britain as only 3% of British people actually speak it even though most English dictionaries now give phonetics for RP pronunciation. RP speakers pronounce 'H' at the beginning of words such as 'hurt' and avoids it in words such as 'arm' and doesn't pronounce 'R' in 'car' and 'heart and uses the long 'a'. But cockney speakers do the opposite.

Accent identification is used very widely. For example, 'American' 'Australian' 'British' 'Irish' 'welsh' etc. but they are also be more specific to counties or cities – 'Yorkshire' 'Lancashire' 'Liverpool' 'New York'. Even with these general identifications, an accent can be influenced by its neighbouring areas. For example, the vowel system of Northern Irish closely resembles Scottish English, the South Wales accent is very much influenced by its neighbouring areas such as Bristol and the West-Country, Mid-Wales' accent has a strong comparison with that spoken in places like Shrewsbury and North Wales has a strong resemblance to Merseyside and also Liverpool (which has low prestige). For example, 'Foot' and 'Strut' and have the same vowel: /ʊ/ and /p, t, k/ are heavily aspirated (fricated).  But /t/ coming out like/s/ is not Scouse influenced: /dɔːtsər/ (daughter). However, this is not always the case, the Scouse accent has little in common with those used in the neighbouring regions of Cheshire and Lancashire.

In East Lancaster, 'Nurse'  and 'Square' are pronounced with /ɜː/ and areas that border Yorkshire are more likely for 'There' 'Where' and 'Swear' to be pronounced with / ɪə / so it rhymes with 'Here'.  The closer you move to Manchester, the less roticity there is.

There is also such a thing as 'Foreign Accent Syndrome'. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_accent_syndrome) This is where a person develops a foreign accent or sometimes a whole different language from places they have never been to or have only briefly visited. This is usually a result from a head trauma or a stroke of some sort. (http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=foreign+accent+syndrome)

Scottish (Gaelic) descended from Old English. Speaking Scots and Standard Scottish English has become blurred: 'Wee' for 'little', 'does nae' for 'doesn't', rhyming 'house' with 'goose' and 'house' with 'heed'.

So it sucks that no one will ever know who had the first accent and where he got it from but this is the most useful information I could gather. If this interests you as well as me, a good book to read is David Crystal: The English Language. It has some really interesting stuff about pronunciation across the UK.