In our chat today raised two questions about region accents:

1. Why does the UK, though far smaller than the US, have far more distict regional accents? (Or put differently, why does the larger US have relatively few?)
2. When listening to a speaker, how well are you able to tell whether he/she is from the US, UK, Australia or South Africa, and to identify particular regions of the country you live in?

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As an aside, the subject of "regional accents" reminded me of the poem The V-A-S-E by James Jeffrey Roche (1847-1908).

From the madding crowd they stand apart,
The maidens four and the Work of Art;
And none might tell from sight alone
In which had Culture ripest grown, --

The Gotham Million fair to see,
The Philadelphia Pedigree,
The Boston Mind of azure hue,
Or the soulful Soul from Kalamazoo,--

For all loved Art in a seemly way,
With an earnest soul and a capital A.

Long they worshipped; but no one broke
The sacred stillness, until up spoke
The Western one from the nameless place,
Who blushing said: "What a lovely vace!"

Over three faces a sad smile flew,
And they edged away from Kalamazoo.

But Gotham's haughty soul was stirred
To crush the stranger with on small word.
Deftly hiding reproof in praise,
She cries: "Tis, indeed, a lovely vaze!"

But brief her unworthy triumph when
The lofty one from the home of Penn,
With the consciousness of two grandpapas,
Exclaims: "It is quite a lovely vahs!"

And glances round with an anxious thrill,
Awaiting the word of Beacon Hill.

But the Boson maid smiles courteouslee,
And gently murmurs: "Oh, pardon me!
"I did not catch your remark, because
I was so entranced with that charming vaws!"

Dies erti praegelida
Sinistra quum Bostonia.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: shufitz,

But what about vahz?

Anyway, large parts of the US have only been inhabited by anglophones for 200 years or less. Takes time to develop an accent. In the NE, there's accents a plenty, but closer to 400 years occupation.

Shouldn't the second pronunciation be "vaze" to rhyme with "praise"?

Or do they both rhyme with "prawn" in the UK?

Corrected!

As jheem says, it's basically amount of time. There are other factors, such as degree of isolation, so mountain valleys tend to get very fragmented linguistic situations (e.g. New Guinea, Caucasus); but with English there are no such extreme situations, so dialect variation is mainly in England and lowlands Scotland. Within the Americas, the variation is mainly down the east coast, and all the rest of the continent is more uniform.

I'm equivocal about how much effect population has. A heavily populated place, such as London or New York, potentially offers more 'mutations', so more variations can arise; but on the other hand there are also more people nearby who use standard forms and who swamp the newly-arisen mutation. It is like biology: on a small island a 'founder effect' can cause arbitrary changes to become entrenched, but in a larger space genes or variations spread more freely, and the most common variant is in a position to overwhelm mutations.

It is sometimes very useful to have an ear for regional accents. I remember some years ago chatting to a barmaid in a London pub. She was very pleased that I recognised her New Zealand accent; most people assumed she was from Australia.

quote:

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Originally posted by aput:
It is like biology: on a small island a 'founder effect' can cause arbitrary changes to become entrenched, but in a larger space genes or variations spread more freely, and the most common variant is in a position to overwhelm mutations.

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I don't know anything at all about a 'founder effect' but I suspect that what happens with dialect mutations is more akin to mathematical chaos theory, where an arbitrarily small change in any any of the original conditions can lead to large and unpredictable changes later. My reasoning for this is that if we graph the variations in accents geographically what we end up with looks very much like the kind of graph we get with chaotic functions where the graph will move along varying only slightly from district to district but then suddenly (the mathematical word would be catastrophically) shows a discontinuity and changes value to an entirely new accent with little or no apparent connection to accents very nearby.

There has been some interesting work done in computational linguistics with models of linguistic change, including: Luc Steels ar VUB (agents, adaptive systems) and Don Ringe and Tandy Warnow at UPenn (cladistics).

What is truly amazing to me is that, at least in the U.S., while some people who have lived in Texas all their lives might have a typical Texan accent, others have only the slightest of accents. I have always wondered why that happens. Or, we have a friend who moved to the U.S. about 30 years ago from Manchester. He has a very typical Manchester accent, even though he has been totally Americanized. Yet, I have met people from Boston or NY, or most recently Mexico, who have moved and completely lost their accents. There must be an individual variability with accents and dialects.

Accents are very subjective. I have a friend who was born and raised in England, but moved here to the States in her late teens. To most Americans she sounds British, but to most Britons she sounds American. Why? Our ears are very finely tuned to the phonology of the language(s) that we speak. We tend to hear minute differences in accent that are divergences from the sounds we are used to.

OTOH, education, class, and other social factors (there's a whole 'nother kind of linguistics called sociolinguistics), come into play with accents. It used to be that a good part of public schooling in the UK was getting one to change one's native dialect / accent for RP (standard British English, i.e., received pronunciation). 30 years ago all the anchors on the BBC sounded alike: some kind of BBC / RP speak. Nowadays, you hear distinct regional (e.g., Irish, Scottish, African, Indian) accents on the BBC. Same for Americans. I took a class from a professor who spoke what sounded to my ear like a standard American (TV / midwest) accent, but once he and some students went out for dinner and drinks, and by the end of the evening I noticed that he spoke with quite a strong Texan accent. (And one of the students who was a grad student at Oxford was speaking with a decided Cockney one.) Next day at lecture, all was back to "normal".

Individual differences in speech are sometimes refered to as ideolect. Most people also speak more than one sociolect or register. Some are privileged and others deprecated.

Sharp differentiation between dialects or accents is usually illusory. If two dialects are distinguished by a number of features, the lines on the map demarcating each of those features individually are often unrelated: you get intermediate areas with some feature but not others.

Here in Georgia, USA, there are many different accents... North Georgia (the mts.)... almost a British sound; south of North Georgia (where I live.. a very nasal twang); Atlanta (don't even ask..carpetbaggers!); middle Georgia (soft and soothing); South Georgia.. back to the twang and yuck sound... I can identify almost immediately what section of Georgia one hales from ...

NYC is different from upstate New York; Miami is different from Long Island...

Oh, and I'm from middle Georgia.. soft and soothing!

Oh, I am glad you are soft and soothing!

We have a Brit here visiting us for a few days, and I swear his accent changes from time to time. Sometimes he has that typical Birmingham rising voice at the end of the sentence (also the Scots seem to have that); other times he sounds like he is from London to me, in that it is a much more formal English.