TUTORIAL WEEK 15 Further discussion on the needs of accents in a society.

The first children to grow up in a new place are very important. The children who grow up together are a 'peer group'. They want to speak the same as each other to express their group identity. The accent they develop as they go through their childhood will become the basis for the accents of the new place.

 The first generation of children will draw on the accents of the adults around them, and will create something new. If people move to a new place in groups (as English speakers did to America, Australia and New Zealand) that group usually brings several different accents with them. The children will draw on the mixture of accents they hear and create their own accent out of what they hear.

 The modern accents of Australia are more similar to London accents of English than to any other accent from England -- this is probably because the founder generation (in the eighteenth century) had a large component drawn from the poor of London, who were transported to Australia as convicts. The accents of New Zealand are similar to Australian accents because a large proportion of the early Englishspeaking settlers of New Zealand came from Australia.

 The mix found in the speech of the settlers of a new place establishes the kind of accent that their children will develop. But the first generation born in the new place will not keep the diversity of their parents' generation -- they will speak with similar accents to the others of their age group. And if the population grows slowly enough, the children will be able to absorb subsequent children into their group, so that even quite large migrations of other groups (such as Irish people into Australia) will not make much difference to the accent of the new place.

 Most parents know this. If someone from New York (US) marries someone from Glasgow (Scotland, UK), and these two parents raise a child in Leeds (England, UK), that child will not speak like either of the parents, but will speak like the children he (I know of such a child!) is at school with.

 First of all, you have to realize that an accent is made up of three parts: intonation, liaisons, and pronunciation. You have to learn the "rules" of these three components of your new language. The work "rule" is in quotes because in speech all "rules" may be broken by native speakers in special circumstances. Still, if a "rule" helps you 9 times out of ten, you shouldn't complain if it fails you once.

 Intonation is the most important and the most difficult to change. It is the "music", the rhythm or a language. Liaisons, or linkages, are the ways that words and parts of words are linked together in a language. This may be very different from how you do it in your native language.

 And pronunciation is the way that sounds are made in the new language. These sounds may be similar (rarely exactly the same) to the sounds of your own language, or they may be very different. To learn the sounds, you have to learn where in the mouth the sound is made, how it is made, and the position of the tongue in making the sound.