Window on the word: Why do accents form and why do they matter?

The study that recently revealed new speech patterns in Antarctica, reveals a lot more. What might people sound like in space, or on Mars?

Language is very new to Antarctica. The first humans only landed here in the mid-1890s. The first burst of research stations occurred 70 years ago, in the 1950s.

(Images: Adobe Stock; Imaging: Monica Gupta)

Each such station typically holds researchers from multiple nationalities, who remain isolated for months. So it is no surprise that linguistic evolution here has scientists of a very different kind sitting up and taking notice.

A study that made global news recently explores how a new accent is evolving on the world’s coldest continent. Linguists have also been tracking the creation of new words here for decades, looking for clues to key questions about how languages evolve.

In the hierarchy of verbs, nouns and emotions, for instance, which ones emerge first and how do they influence each other? Could Antarctica offer clues to precisely how an accent evolves?

The recent study examined linguistic patterns among a batch of people isolated at Britain’s Rothera Research Station through the winter of 2018. This station usually hosts about 25 people in winter — explorers and scientists from a range of countries, and management staff.

“We got to learn each other’s stories pretty quickly. There were a lot of conversations about the weather – these crazy winds we’d get, the sea ice, icebergs, clouds,” Marlon Clark, one of the researchers in the study, told the BBC. The words coined here in recent years reflect these themes.

In what is now officially being called Antarctic English, there are terms for icebergs of varying sizes, for skies of different temperaments, and for the way humans respond to the experience of a never-ending polar night.

“Growlers” are menacing icebergs that are hard to spot and almost entirely submerged in the sea. This term draws from the diaries of early explorers, who likened these icy threats to a beast “rearing its head as if incensed”. “Big eye” is the term for the insomnia attributed to the extreme change in the number and nature of daylight hours.

Words coined in Antarctica, incidentally, were first researched by the Australian linguist and historian Bernadette Hince, who created The Antarctic Dictionary in 2000. This is a compendium of over 2,000 English-based words, acronyms and phrases from early writings, scientific papers, reported speech, and mentions of the continent in literature, magazines, newspapers and advertisements.

“Homers” for home-brewed beer, for instance, was first recorded in a 1970 magazine article about life at an Australian Antarctic research station. “Kodak poisoning”, a whimsical term dating to the 1980s, describes the frenzied photographing of scenic sunrises and sunsets.

Also listed are terms that researchers bond over after they leave. An evocative one is “green out”, for the overwhelming sensation of seeing and smelling trees and plants in the outdoors again.

Lunar tunes

Back to the recent accent study, there is plenty to unpack. Why do accents form? Why do (or did) they matter? What can Antarctica tell us about how language might evolve in outer space?

For the study, a team of phonetics researchers from Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich recruited Clark, then a marine research assistant with British Antarctic Survey, and 10 others from that winter’s batch, including people from the UK, US, Germany and Iceland.

They asked each participant to create a 10-minute recording every few weeks, in which they recited a list of 29 words (including telling ones such as feed, feud, show, food, and tofu).

By the end of their six-and-a-half-months together, the winterers were producing the vowel in words such as “show” and “food” more similarly, with the back of the tongue further forward in the mouth than it had been at the start of that period. These acoustic changes were so small that they were not noticeable in speech, but were measurable by computational models.

Of the 2018 batch of 11, a German woman’s accent shifted the most, researchers found.

The change across the board points to an interesting theory about the purpose of accents, says Jonathan Harrington, a professor of phonetics and digital speech processing and principal investigator of the project (officially titled Human Interaction and the Evolution of Spoken Accent (2017–2023); funded by the European Research Council).

Accents likely developed as an evolutionary defence mechanism, to help early humans quickly identify outsiders, a vital skill given that outsiders typically posed a threat to the health, safety and resources of the group.

Accents are born, he adds, because we imitate each other, often without realising we are doing so. But we are sensitive to the differences.

“Our ability to identify foreign accents as listeners remains quite remarkable,” Harrington says. “In many parts of the world, accents still vary from village to village and are very difficult to learn and replicate faithfully in adulthood — except by skilled actors such as Meryl Streep.”

Could the model used to measure the change in the Antarctic winterers’ speech help predict how language will evolve as humans venture further, to settlements on the Moon, or onwards to Mars?

“The greater the extent to which individuals are isolated from their home community, the more rapid accent change is likely to be,” Harrington says. Antarctica, for instance, has live satellite phone links with the rest of the world. “With a delay of about three minutes in any speech signals sent between Mars and Earth, regular communication would be far more difficult. The isolation would be complete. The accent change would likely be faster in such conditions.”

Given that such voyagers would spend years in transit, with the mix of nationalities varying in each vessel, there would likely be an array of speech patterns emerging. In such cases, each new one would likely be shaped by the majority accent — or the original accent of those who did the most talking, Harrington adds.

Speaking in the accent, within the community that birthed it, is key to keeping it alive, he points out. The one created by the winterers did not survive long after their return home.

But the fleeting change did unlock a final mystery. It confirmed that how speech sounds depends on social interaction rather than on geographic location. The same individuals would likely have formed the same accent, Harrington points out, even if they had been isolated at the equator or the Arctic instead.