Why do people have the different accent in the same country?

Don’t people have different accents in your country as well? Languages are something we create when we interact with others. Groups of people that aren’t connected will start to talk to each other slightly differently and if that’s going on for long enough they will create a completely new language.

I'm from Spain, which is much smaller than the US and here you have different accents even in the same region and province, and within them, you have different accents depending on the town/village. I have friends from Italy and there are many accents too there. The difference from North to South is huge, but even in a specific area there are many different accents. I guess this happens in every country on earth, even the smallest ones.

the US is just a little smaller than Europe. including anglophone Canada, it's even bigger. it's honestly amazing that so many people in such a massive geographical area mostly speak the same language with different dialects and accents.

This s not limited to the US (or even English). Many other countries have multiple accents for a single language:: \- Spain \- UK \- South Korea \- China \- Japan \- Germany \- France \- Brazil In all cases, political and linguistic unity (being citizens of one country and speaking a one language) does't overshadow the cultural, demographic, and geographic diversity of the people and their use of that common language. It just happens by nature of communities being separated. That said, the UK is a mystery to me. Some estimate it has 30+ accents (more than all of the US) - in such a (relatively) small country!‽‽!?

People generally stay in one region most- if not all of their lives. So they grow up, live with, marry, have children, and communicate with people in the same region. Each region basically has its own history and culture and could be its own country. So if you grow up in Germany, you'll probably speak German. If you grow up in Wisconsin, you'll probably speak Midwestern English. There's some statistic that the average person only talks to about 15 people on any given day. So unless you're someone living in a large city with people from other regions or have family members from another region/culture, chances are you'll adopt the same accent. This is true for any language.

There are numerous factors but the main ones are: * Immigration, conquest, colonialisation (e.g. New Jersey has an Italian influence, from Italian immigrants speaking English; parts of Spain had a Moorish influence, from Arabic-speaking Moorish conquerors mixing with the population, eventually speaking Spanish or adding Arabic pronunciations to the local area) * Accents changing over time, but geographic isolation meaning they evolve in different ways. Just like mammals in Australia and South America, they start the same but diverge over time. Why do accents change over time? Because of laziness (e.g elision) or paradigm shifts (e.g. the printing press). * Class. Rich people try to sound different to common people. Common people try to emulate them.

Think about your friends in high school. Did you share inside jokes? Maybe someone said something stupid one day and you all thought it was funny, so you kept saying that word in the same way so much so that it just became part of your vocabulary. Or maybe a teacher forced you to use words in a certain way, and you just became used to it. Or a couple of really cool people moved on, who spoke different languages or said words differently. So you'd be cool, you adopted some of their words. So they fit in, they tried to use your pronunciation but said things just a bit differently. The result was some hodgepodge of both. Once upon a time, there was no mass audio or visual media. Long distance travel was hard, time consuming, and unaffordable for almost the entire populace. So people pretty much stayed in one place, and communicated with the same, insular groups. Sometimes, those insular groups would develop their own language, grammar, vocabulary, or accent. Sometimes immigration or politics (being conquered or just wanting to fit in with the ruling class) created changes in the language. And because groups were fairly separate, those changes could develop undisturbed. The us is physically large, and immigration happened in very different ways with very different populations, so the language influences are different. (Huge distances arent necessarily required--look at the significant different accents in the British Isles). Mass media is slowly eating away at some of this but creating of other differences. People who spend time on, say, Twitch, have different slang than people who only look at Facebook.

The exact same reasons people from different countries have different accents. Accents develop organically; it's not like they recognise national borders.

A guy in Boston about 200 years ago started to use the term “youse guys” and it was really popular and everyone in Boston starts saying youse guys instead of you all. San Francisco never got the memo and kept using you all. Then San Franciscans all started overemphasizing /a/ and Bostonians didn’t. That then gets extrapolated over 200 years and hundreds of different little changes like that and boom, you have 2 distinct dialects of English. 1000 years, give or take, and you will have 2 different languages.

Places a lot smaller than the ones that you have mentioned have different accents. Here in Ireland, which is a lot smaller than the USA, we have many very different accents, for people living only a few miles away. There is nothing unusual about that in any part of the world. All sorts of things mix in to give different accents.

Literally every country has this

Over time, relative isolation and language change will make different communities sound different. The US is big and old enough that most of the country has a bit of a regional accent.

Every language in the world has different accents?

I can drive for 6 hours in 1 direction at 70-80 MPH and be in the same state, countries are BIG, especially the US and Canada, so people in vastly different regions have different accents

If you end up in a large, mostly english-speaking country like Canada (almost 10 million km^2), you’ll find MANY different accents. An east coast accent is waaay different than an accent from rural Alberta, West Coast, Quebec, any of the territories, even Toronto. Areas closer to the US boarder often use more American phrases, etc. A lot of countries are huge, which means that the different groups of people within them will speak differently. Therefore, more accents! Even small countries have the same thing, but larger countries can experience on a different scale.

1) You'd need an airplane ticket or multiple days of driving to get from California to Boston. 2) If you think the U.S. has lots of accents, the U.K. also has quite a few notable accents despite being much smaller than California.

Where are you from that people don't have different accents? I'm Dutch and even we need subtitles on TV for certain regions of the country. 

Humans are sociable, tribal creatures. We like to fit in with our peers, and it can be useful to instantly identify friends or detect potential outsiders who pose a threat. I know it's unlikely that California will invade Boston, but old habits die hard. Accents have become somewhat more homogenous across the world in recent history, as have languages, as people have increasingly moved around.

Virtually every country in the world has accents in their language if they’re large enough. There’s accents in Germany and France, China and South Korea. The US is enormous geographically so naturally different accents develop