The distinctiveness of the accent heard in a place reflects that place’s isolation. It’s probably no coincidence that, as almost every place in the world has become less isolated, accents have become less distinctive. In these days of vanishing forms of regional speech, if you wanted to hear a new one coming into being, you’d have to go to the ends of the Earth — or one specific end of the Earth, anyway, as demonstrated not long ago by researchers from the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. Taking and analyzing recordings made over the course of one winter, they discovered that a new accent has begun to take shape in English as spoken in Antarctica.
“Antarctica has no native population or permanent residents, but it does have a transitory community of scientists and support staff who live there for part of the year on a rotational basis,” writes Tom Hale at IFL Science. “In the summer months, there are typically around 5,000 people living in Antarctica, but that drops to just 1,000 in the winter.” It was from this group of the Antarctic “over-winterers” — and in particular, from those working on the British Antarctic Survey — that the linguistic researchers recruited their subjects, eight of whom were from England, one from the United States, one from Germany, and one from Iceland.
“The findings revealed subtle but measurable changes in the speech of the overwintering staff during their time in Antarctica,” writes Mental Floss’ Brett Reynolds. “One change was convergence, where individuals in a close-knit group unconsciously begin to adopt similar speech characteristics. In this case, that meant convergence of /u/ (the ‘oo’ in goose), /ju/ (the ‘you’ in few), /ou/ (the ‘oh’ in goat), and /ɪ:/ (the ‘ee’ in the last syllable in happy).” Apart from that phenomenon, the researchers also noticed another change in the /ou/ of goat: “the over-winterers began to pronounce it more toward the front of their mouths than toward the back. (British pronunciations are already typically fronter than American /ou/.)”
Even if you got into a conversation with a scientist just back from a long winter in Antarctica, you probably wouldn’t notice any of this. But the fact that the differences between the series of recordings taken at six-week intervals during the winter show measurable changes in pronunciation when compared to control recordings taken back in the United Kingdom suggests that the isolation of Antarctica really does encourage the formation of a new accent. Given a sufficiently long time span, an accent naturally becomes a dialect, and eventually a separate language. Perhaps, even in our age of much-lamented loss of linguistic diversity, some of us can look forward to having Antarctic-speaking descendants.
via Mental Floss
Related content:
The Speech Accent Archive: The English Accents of People Who Speak 341 Different Languages
Why You Have an Accent When You Speak a Foreign Language
What English Would Sound Like If It Was Pronounced Phonetically
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
SO THEREFORE.….……WHAT? I’M FAIRLY CERTAIN THIS WAS AN AMERICAN UNDERTAKING. I THOUGHT WE WERE ON THE VERGE OF HAVING TO CLOSE THE GOVERNMENT. HOW MANY MILLIONS FOR THIS CRAP. WELL WHATEVER THE AMOUNT, MULTIPLY IT BY, OH I DON’T KNOW, 1O,000 UNITS OF USELESS SCIENTIFIC CRAP AND WE’LL FIND BILLIONS OF DOLLARS. TENS OF BILLIONS OF DOLLARS. OUTER SPACE IS ANOTHER ONE. WHY DO WE NEED TO KNOW JUST EXACTLY HOW BIG THE UNIVERSE IN AND WHEN AND HOW IT BEGAN, BECAUSE IT’S INTERESTING BS AND PBS CAN HAVE MORE AND MORE TV SHOWS ABOUT THESE SORTS OF THINGS. HOW MANY BILLIONS HAVE WE SPENT ON TELESCOPES AND ALL OF IT. GALACTIC PEEPING TOMS. I GUESS THERE IS SOME MERIT IN TRYING TO COLONIZE ON THE MOON AND OR MARS. WHEN WILL THAT EVER HAPPEN? WE HAVE THE MONEY FOR THINGS LIKE THIS?
Man, you are realy, realy dumb. You haven’t the slightest clue about the workings and value of science and its relation to the emergency of technology and the development of public policy, global or local. And you are also rude, writting in capital letters. Why are you shouting? I can only believe you are from USA since it is hard to find such a pride in being ignorant elsewhere. And by no means am I sayng that it is true of all or most (USA) americans, I have the utmost respect for scientists and philosophers from this country.
The article clearly states that the study was conducted by researchers at the Ludwig Maximillian University of Munich. That’s in Germany, so I’m not sure how you’re certain this was an American undertaking. Take up your complaints with the German government.
And when we quit spending money on ‘THINGS LIKE THIS’ you’ll be able to spend all day counting your money.
What a wonderful prospect.
Garbage.
You say “including eight individuals from England”: did you mean the UK, or did they actually all come from the country called England?
Because if the answer is ‘UK’, there’s the first flaw in this so-called ‘research’. All you’ve done is prove that if you put the middle-classes in a confined space for long enough, they turn into clones of each other.
Anyone in the UK could have told you that.
‘New accent’ lol.
Forgot to add that anyone in the UK who attended a private, fee-paying school tends to have the same accent anyway, regardless to which part of the country they were actually born in.
The whole idea is to reinforce the concept of them being the ‘Chosen Ones’, somehow different and superior to the rest of the population. By definition they’re more likely to shape themselves to resemble those of a similar disposition around them, since they’re already been programmed to do so from a very young age.
This could be the result of the fact that spoken language has not occurred in Antarctica for a very long time indeed. Now that some amount of linguistic communication has occurred there, the interactivity between the Earth’s locations and certain languages spoken here has caused the researchers in Antarctica to alter their speech habits.
If my findings in Linguistic Archaeocryptography are even just generally correct, then the matrix of locations that is synchronized to various possible words featuring Hebrew as a remnant of the original ancient plan, and used still, and which is enforced as mathematical law (the only competent presentation for this concept of which I know is The Code by Carl Munck), has an effect on our minds and our spoken communication, and these in turn affect that matrix.
As Munck has taught, the mathematics only make sense using the Great Pyramid at Giza as the Prime Meridian of Earth. Adjusting the math accordingly, we find, for example, to choose just a few conspicuous examples, that Stonehenge is at 33° W of Giza and 51° N of the Equator. The Longitude is prone to being a linguistic adjective and the Latitude a linguistic noun. So the shapes at stonehenge, of a jaw set in a wheel, form the words “Teeth Wheel.” When you give teeth to a wheel, you get a GEAR, the Hebrew for which is GLGL, spelled Gilgal in English. This indicates that those architects of knowledge who preserve the ancient tradition have made sure that those words will have those numerical values, if the appropriate Hebrew values are taken for the English letters, A=1, B=2, C=8, D=4, E or H = 5, and so on.
That these machinations were known in advance of the choosing of the location of the Trinity Atomic Test site can be shown by the fact that the longitude from Giza is 138, the total of the word ATOMIC, and the latitude is 33, which we just found was TEETH, but which might (in a longer explanation) be found to be the Hebrew word GL, meaning “Fountain.” The Trinity explosion was therefore architecturally an “Atomic Fountain,” with again the longitude providing the adjective and the latitude providing the noun.
Most numbers have many words that they total, so the location of the famous Area 51 in Nevada can signify either “Good Law” or “Bayonet City.”
The linguistic aspect of this study is known popularly as “Code Talking” and was made famous as “Navajo” Code Talking. But the account that is presented to the public is a cover story. The language used was not Navajo but Hebrew. In the steandard Hebrew-based Code Talking code, the word “Navajo” also adds up to 138. The “Navajo” Code Talkers were in fact the ATOMIC Code Talkers.
This combination of language and archaeocryptography indicates that neither Code Talking nor Archaeocryptography are “pseudo-sciences” as the Intelligence cover-up wants us to believe.
Now, I say that we are all participating in this living mathematics with everything we say. Some human actions are taken according to promptings from these components of influence around us, and some things occur according to them and not our idea of what must be. For example, Ernest Shackleton supposedly got his idea to take his ship the Endurance to Antarctica on his own. Whether we want to believe that he got his idea from external sources, as I claim, it is astonishing that the Endurance went down at the location indicating the words “Chill Wind.” There is no call to believe Shackleton would do this deliberately, yet his action resulted in the proving of the location on Earth of where the expression “Chill Wind” is — again with the longitude providing the adjective and the latitude providing the noun.
With this background of information I find it completely believable, and in fact it supports my theory, that location alone is a factor in the usage of language.