Why Do We Have Accents?

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Your accent is essentially the way you sound when speaking. Accents can be classified as a  'foreign' accent, which occurs when a person speaks one language using some of the rules or sounds of another one. This is why a person's manner of speaking can sound "wrong" to native speakers of the language.

The other kind of accent is simply the way a group of people speak their native language. This is determined by where they live and what social groups they belong to. If you meet someone with a slow Texas drawl, it will be very apparent to you, but not to them. 

That brings us back to the question of why we often have an accent if speaking in a language that is not our mother tongue. People find it difficult to pronounce sounds that don't exist in the language (or languages) first learned as a baby and young child. Logically, we are born with the ability to make all of the sounds of all human languages. In infancy, a child begins to learn what sounds are important in his or her language, and will ignore the rest. By the time you're a year old, you've learned to ignore most distinctions among sounds that don't matter in your own language. The older you get, the harder it becomes to learn the sounds that are part of a different language.

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