The origins of an accent

[LysseC]

snip

Well, in an exam I took at university I studied some linguistics, and I was told that genetically, we begin with the capacity to pronunciate every possible sound, and then, by listening to adults speaking our brains automatically "register" and learn to reproduce only some of them, forgetting about the others when we grow up. For example, Japanese speakers never learn how to pronunciate Ls, but only Rs, so when they try to pronunciate a word with an L in it, they don't even recognize it as an L.
So I don't think that genetics has some to do with accents. In fact, if you take for example a child born from African parents that is adopted when he's very little, less then a year for example, and grows up in England, being exposed only to English speakers, he doesn't have any different accent from that of the speakers with whom he grows up.
So I don't think that different evolutions of an accent can be ascribed to gentic differences.
That being said, I still am quite in the dark as to what they can be ascribed too...

 

[Loopy]

Well....in theory, the planet used to have one big chunka continent....no wait. Never mind. This is mind-blowing.

Yep, it was called Pangea...pretty silly name considering it basically means what it is.

There's also the idea that all people of the world came from Africa, but then went all over the world, and due to the plates moving, the continents were formed, people became separated into groups and developed their own way of speaking over thousands of years.

Well, in an exam I took at university I studied some linguistics, and I was told that genetically, we begin with the capacity to pronunciate every possible sound, and then, by listening to adults speaking our brains automatically "register" and learn to reproduce only some of them, forgetting about the others when we grow up. For example, Japanese speakers never learn how to pronunciate Ls, but only Rs, so when they try to pronunciate a word with an L in it, they don't even recognize it as an L.
So I don't think that genetics has some to do with accents. In fact, if you take for example a child born from African parents that is adopted when he's very little, less then a year for example, and grows up in England, being exposed only to English speakers, he doesn't have any different accent from that of the speakers with whom he grows up.
So I don't think that different evolutions of an accent can be ascribed to gentic differences.
That being said, I still am quite in the dark as to what they can be ascribed too...

True. All children have the ability to learn any language, but the more time they spend with parents, the more they abosrb that language and learn only those sounds. Makes sense really. Baby needs to survive and make its needs known, and the best way is through learning the language of their parents.
As for Japanese, they know L and R sounds, but they cannot tell the difference between the two. They will say L or R without knowing which they said.:lol: I've done the same thing after Japanese lectures. I honestly can't hear the difference between L and R sounds after Japanese lectures. It always makes my roomies laugh.

 

[ef9dante_oSsshea]

what about the tower of babel story that we ended up speaking different languages as a punishment by god

 

[Loopy]

what about the tower of babel story that we ended up speaking different languages as a punishment by god

I think that's also the same story where god makes all the continents so that people are too far apart to build the tower and get to heaven.