Accent (linguistics)

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This article is about the pronunciation characteristic of a particular group of people relative to another group. For the term used to describe a stress on a syllable, see Stress (phonology).
For other uses, see Accent (disambiguation).

In linguistics, an accent is a manner of pronunciation of a language. Accents can be confused with dialects which are varieties of language differing in vocabulary and syntax as well as pronunciation. Dialects are usually spoken by a group united by geography or social status.

Contents

[edit] Phonology

[edit] Development

Main article: sound change

Children are able to take on accents at a fast rate; children of traveling families, for example, can change their accents within a short period of time. This generally remains true until a person's early twenties,[1] after which, a person's accent seems to become more entrenched.

All the same, accents are not fixed even in adulthood. An acoustic analysis by Jonathan Harrington of Queen Elizabeth II's Royal Christmas Messages revealed that the speech patterns of even so conservative a figure as a monarch can continue to change over her lifetime.[2]

[edit] History
Sociolinguistics topics
General
Accent (linguistics)
Generative linguistics
Cognitive linguistics
Computational linguistics
Descriptive linguistics
Linguistic pragmatics
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