Received pronunciation
Question: How do accents develop and change? More specifically, how do new
accents form, such as those that arose in Australia and New Zealand? Presumably
these are no more than 200 years old.
Answer: Accents and dialects develop and change for two distinct reasons, one
phonetic, the other social. On the phonetic side, speech sounds change because
of the way they are produced and perceived. Feel the position of your tongue
against the roof of your mouth when you say the K sounds at the beginning of
“key” and “car”. The tongue makes contact farther forward in “key” than in…
