ABSTRACT
A particular way in which a group of people collectively pronounce
a language. For any language with more than a handful of speakers, there are prominent regional, social and individual differences in
the way the language is pronounced by different people, and the
pronunciation of many words usually changes quite radically over
time. Sometimes these differences are dramatic. Each distinguish-
able type of pronunciation is called an accent. Depending on where we come from and what experience we have, we will be able to
identify accents different from our own with more or less precision:
in the case of English this may be an American accent, a Deep South accent, a Scottish accent, a working-class London accent, a
French accent (from a non-native speaker) and so on. Speakers of
all languages can do the same.
