Comments by "" (@Nynke_K) on "Why Does My Voice Sound Like This?" video.

  1. Linguist here: actually, while you're absolutely right that there is a lot of variation in how good adults are at this, it does absolutely have to do with age - but we're taking about little kids being really good, and approximately by secondary school age language learning gets a lot worse. If you take a baby from, say, Amsterdam and move it to Manchester and have it raised among English speakers there, it will learn perfect Manchester English!
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  2. Linguist here: an accent is a particular style of pronouncing things, so if everyone in the world spoke exactly the same way (let's say in biblical Babel or in fictional Scotland), that way would still come with one particular accent. But then, of course no one would notice and the concept wouldn't be useful. But in the real world, people don't all talk to each other every day and also use their speech styles to signal they're part of different social groups, and so we have many different accents (and languages)!
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