Accents tell us where someone’s  from, whether they’re chatting   about pahking their cah or giving you  their recipe for tater tot hot dish.

They’re often a legacy of the cultures  and languages that influenced the people   in that part of the world, and  they usually develop over decades. Except for this one.

There’s a regional accent so rare  that it has zero native speakers. Because the only people who’ve ever  used it were living in Antarctica. [♪ INTRO] First, let’s talk about what  accents are, and why we have them. Accents are the unique ways that a  group of people pronounce their words.

That sounds obvious, I know. Every language or region has its own inventory  of linguistic sounds called phonemes. Humans are capable of making hundreds of phonemes,   but there aren’t any languages out there  that come close to using all of them.

We’re born with the ability to notice the  subtle differences between virtually all of   the possible sounds, but over time,  we lose the ability to distinguish   between them if they don’t exist in  the languages that we’re learning. For instance, in English, we  use R and L sounds differently,   so English speakers need to be able to  hear the difference between “r” and “l”. But those sounds don’t show up in Japanese, so  someone who was raised primarily speaking Japanese   might not hear the difference quite as well,  or be able to reproduce both noises separately.

At least, not without some practice. Celery! Our brains pretty much figure out which  sounds matter and which ones don’t,   and stop caring about the ones that we aren’t  going to need and chuck them out of our heads.

It’s a real “is this going  to be on the test” vibe. And here’s why this matters for accents. When you learn to speak another language,  you don’t just have to learn new vocabulary.

You have to learn those new phonemes, too,  and that can be really challenging if those   new sounds are really different from  what you’ve been using your whole life. For example, English has a lot of vowel sounds. Depending on what regional  variation we’re talking about,   English has as many as 15-20 unique vowel sounds.

Most other languages in the world  average around 5-6 vowel sounds,   so this is just one of the many  ways that English is weird. That’s also why when someone is learning  English as their second language,   they’ll often struggle to pronounce  all of these different vowel sounds. They straight up just don’t have  that many in their mother tongue.

That’s why a Spanish speaker talking in English   might pronounce the words sit and  seat similarly, because in Spanish,   the distinction between the vowel ɪ in sit,  and the vowel i in seat, doesn’t exist. So when you’re chatting with a non-native  speaker of the language that you’re both using,   just know their jaw probably hurts,  because they’re literally training   their faces to produce sounds  that they’re not used to making! Accents aren’t just about the first  language you learned as a baby.

Your accent is also shaped by where you’re from,   your cultural connections, and even  your socio-economic background. So for instance, we know that there are a  whole bunch of regional accents across the US. One way that these accents form is  through mergers, where over time,   people start saying two or more different  vowel sounds the exact same way.

One of these is the Mary-marry-merry merger. See, most people in the US  say all three of those words   with the same vowel sound, including me, just now. But without the merger, they sound  more like Mary, marry, and merry,   and those un-merged sounds are found in  New England and Philadelphia accents.

There’s also the caught-cot merger,  where the vowel in the word caught,   as in “I caught the ball” sounds like the  one in “cot” as in, the thing you sleep on. I also say those the same, but without  the merger, it’s more like caught and cot. And over time, if you have enough people  all in one place that start to mimic each   other’s pronunciations, those sound shifts  can add up to a uniquely identifiable accent.

And as it turns out, our brains even  react differently to different accents. A study from 2014 looked at  people’s brain activity while   they were listening to several spoken passages. The researchers found that people  had increased brain activity in   regions linked to emotion and salience  while listening to their own accent,   meaning that their brains treated it as  more emotionally and socially relevant,   while hearing the other group’s accent  reduced activity in the same areas.

So now that we’ve said all that, what’s  the deal with this Antarctic accent? I’ll tell you, but first, we’ve got to  pay the bills, so here’s a quick ad break. Since you watch SciShow, you  probably love engaging with   new ideas and learning outside of a classroom.

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First off, no, an Antarctic accent isn’t  something that the penguins are doing. While there is some research about  certain animals like whales having   regional variation in how they vocalize,  this is all about humans and human language. Now, the astute among you may have realized that  nobody lives in Antarctica, at least not forever.

But there are still people  there, pretty much all the time. They’re researchers! There are around 70 permanent research  stations on the continent, belonging to   29 different countries, and traveling  to and from these stations isn’t easy.

Due to weather conditions, there are only a few   months per year that workers can  make it to Antarctica and back. So if you’re there at the start of  the southern hemisphere’s winter,   you’re not leaving for a while. These Antarctic research stations make a  perfect test case to study accent formation.

Everyone’s stuck in one place and can  really only talk with people in their   group, without any influence from  those outside the language bubble. The first study to identify an Antarctic  accent forming came out in 2019. It looked at eleven researchers living at the  British Antarctic Station, also called winterers.

Eight were British people, one was American,  one was German, and one was from Iceland. The winterers were asked to record  their conversations with each other,   and to repeat the same set of words in  all of those recorded conversations. The researchers who created the study  picked out several words containing   the same vowel for the participants to  pronounce, so that the researchers could   measure and compare the pronunciation  of those vowels among the entire group.

And when they crunched the numbers,  they found two main effects. First, the vowels of the different  winterers converged to become more   similar to one another compared  to before their Antarctic stay. Meaning, they initially pronounced their  vowels differently from one another,   but then their pronunciation started  shifting and sounding more similar.

The reason for that effect is that when we  speak to one another, we do a thing called   accommodation, where we change our speech to be as  clear as possible to the person we are talking to. Often, that means we shift our pronunciations  to be more similar to the pronunciation of the   person we are talking to, and they  do the exact same thing back to us. This is probably why when I go visit  my parents back in Florida I get,   like, a little bit of a southern accent.

So over time, the winterers were all  copying each others’ vowel sounds so   much that they started merging together, like  with those other vowel mergers we talked about. The second effect they found was that one  of the vowels - oh, like in the words flow,   sew, code started “fronting”, meaning it was  pronounced closer to the front of the mouth. So instead of oh, it’s more like … [fronted oh].

I know, subtle, but trust me the researchers can measure a difference. The really weird thing is that this vowel  fronting wasn’t a case of imitation. None of the accents of these speakers  feature this fronted oh vowel,   which means that all eight of them started  essentially inventing a new accent together.

This is what linguists like  to call linguistic innovation,   and it’s a perfect example of  how quickly accents can form. Our brains are tuned to hear the  smallest differences in how the   person in front of us sounds, in  ways that we’re not even aware of! And the weirdest part is that the researchers  don’t know why these winterers did this.

There’s not really a precedent  for something like this happening,   so they don’t know why the whole  group would start doing this. These eight winterers went their separate  ways after the research season was done,   so there’s not really much more we  can say about this Antarctic accent. But with every season, there’s another  chance that more speakers might start   to formulate their own Antarctic accents.

This could even mean that if there’s  ever human settlements on Mars or the   Moon, the people living there will all have their  own accent way faster than you might’ve thought. And whatever vowels you use to say  it, that sounds pretty cool to me. [♪ OUTRO]