<p>If everyone speaks like the people they learn english from, I don’t understand why there’s so much variation in how we speak. Or did people intentionally differentiate how they spoke (like the upper classes might have done)?</p>
<p>Have you ever played telephone?</p>
<p>Well American accents are generally based off of whatever settlement came in. Everyone here might speak English, but you have the people who came here from Germany, so their English sounded weird… so their children picked up some of that.</p>
<p>I like British accents. 
But I really, really like southern accents. Sadly most cannot do one.</p>
<p>I can… -licks lips, wiggles eyebrows, winks-</p>
<p>I don’t get the southern accent thing. It just makes people sound like a hillbilly</p>
<p>The success of telephone depends on the message being humorously garbled. This is not what communication irl depends on. </p>
<p>As far as accents go, I like certain african ones. Those are the only ones I’ve ever really noticed (noticed from films).</p>
<p>One of my friends is from Ghana and she has the coolest accent ever, it’s like art…</p>
<p>
You take issue with this even though you realize that all languages evolved from the one first human language?</p>
<p>I wonder if varying accents are the incipient symptoms of a language that is evolving (or differentiating - it’s important to notice all language hasn’t evolved together, just as life hasn’t either). What I mean is different accents of the same language are probably jumping off points from which a language can divide into multiple languages. That would seem sensible.</p>
<p>So the original question remains though - how do different accents first arise, what is the cause of the first change, and what does it take for that change to snowball into a whole new language. I think this is something fairly fundamental I am taking issue with.</p>
<p>
Yes. Latin developed in varying dialects; the various vulgar Latin dialects became Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, and Romanian. Accents and dialects are the first step.</p>
<p>
When you isolate populations that speak the same language, eventually variation (through slang, environmental factors, external language influence, chance) will appear and not have the opportunity to spread. Do this over hundreds of years, and the differences become pronounced.</p>
<p>and then finally when the language wielding creatures progress enough technologically all language becomes standardized and those differences that arose over millennia are eased (true?). That is where we are heading, yeah?</p>
<p>Anyways, so the evolution of language is sort of like telephone, just a telephone game I wasn’t imagining (one with A LOT of people). But the telephone model is of course very limited. But it’s simple and illustrates the point.</p>