Most Influential Cultures in Our Language
English, French, and Spanish cultures were the most influential, but subsequent groups of immigrants from other countries became equally as influential. The settlers interacted and mixed with non-English-speaking immigrants from other nations, and those unions developed and spread diverse accents across the United States.
Immigrants from the same country of origin often tended to cluster in specific geographic areas and thus contributed to the development of regional accents. Language and accents are always changing because of social, cultural, political, and economic influences, such as globalization and the transnationalism of the 21st century. In the United States, however, the myth persists of a nonaccented, standard English.
According to Lippi-Green, this relates to the way myths function to control people with superstition and fear. A standard view of English ignores the region, country, level of education, culture, religion, and socioeconomic class of the people who speak it. Standard English is understood as a uniform vocabulary, spelling, grammar, and pronunciation, often identified as “educated English.”
It is actually not any of those things. There is really no homogeneous or generic English accent, yet many people associate regional and national accents with negative stereotypes and bias constructs. Language teachers sometimes contribute to reinforcing these stereotypes by portraying “nonstandard” regional and national accents as belonging to categories of inferiority and superiority.
In business communities, people may adjust their accents in order to fit into the socially prescribed speech of a particular environment in which accents can be a burden or an advantage. For example, a person from the southern United States desiring to work in a law firm in New York City may adjust his or her accent in order to fit into the cultural context of New York City, as well as that of a corporate law firm.
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