Accents happen when natural speech variation becomes socially meaningful.

Accents likely started when groups of speakers became separated during pre-historic migrations.

Children learn the accent of the community, not their parents.

Accents picked up in childhood strongly influence what we will sound like in adulthood.

Experts who study how science, history, and psychology shape our speech aren't surprised by our natural curiosity about the accents we hear around us. Even more, people often have personal stories about how accents have affected their own lives or those of the people they know. Why do accents matter so much to the stories we tell about who we are and where we’ve been?

While many of the specific accents around us today are relatively recent, accents have distinguished speakers far back into human prehistory.

That’s because variability in the way we say things is part of the basic design of language; the way we string sounds together into words naturally causes some changes in how each sound is pronounced, and sometimes the way we hear others pronouncing sounds also leads to small adjustments in how we ourselves say them.

When groups of people who speak the same language become separated for long periods of time, as would have occurred during waves of migrations out of Africa some fifty thousand years ago, the natural pronunciation variations that occur as we talk can go in different directions in different groups, though driven by the same underlying tendencies.

Once small pronunciation differences like these accumulate in the speech of separate groups, they become group markers. This linkage between........

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