Why are speech accents such as a southern drawl so regional and where did they come from in the first place?

(Accents are intrusions of a mother language into an acquired language, as when a Mexican or Russian speaks English. Dialects are variations of a language, such as British English, Australian English, American English and so on with each of these huge dialectical entities having subdialects in them.)

According to MSN Encarta, "Dialects develop primarily as a result of limited communication between different parts of a community that share one language. Under such circumstances, changes that take place in the language of one part of the community do not spread elsewhere. As a result, the speech varieties become more distinct from one another. If contact continues to be limited for a long enough period, sufficient changes will accumulate to make the speech varieties mutually unintelligible. When this occurs, and especially if it is accompanied by the sociopolitical separation of a group of speakers from the larger community, it usually leads to the recognition of separate languages. The different changes that took place in spoken Latin in different parts of the Roman Empire, for example, eventually gave rise to the distinct modern Romance languages, including French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, and Romanian."

For specifics on how the Southern dialect emerged and is viewed today, the following is an interesting discussion: http://www.pbs.org/speak/seatosea/americanvarieties/southern/sounds/

For specifics on how the Southern dialect differs from Standarad American English, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_American_English.

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