• Question: Why do people have different accents and speak different languages if we all supposedly comE from the same place

    Asked by Hannah to Steven, Sarah, Lidunka, Jillian, Connor on 18 Jun 2015.
    • Photo: Lidunka Vocadlo

      Lidunka Vocadlo answered on 18 Jun 2015:


      @Hannah well actually a lot of the modern languages are all derived from ancient languages. For example, french, spanish, portuguese, romanian and italian have all evolved from latin. It’s just a consequence of evolution.

    • Photo: Jillian Scudder

      Jillian Scudder answered on 22 Jun 2015:


      We can actually trace a lot of the roots of our different languages back to a previous language! Fundamentally we speak differently because language is extremely fluid (it changes very very rapidly), and we stopped living in the same place a long time ago, so there has been a lot of time for change.

      I do remember a study from a year or so ago where some scientists were trying to see if there were certain words that were similar across all/most languages, because they would indicate that they’ve changed the least since the “mother tongue”. They found that words like “mother”, and “fire” were often pretty similar – “mama” is a common sound for many languages, and fire often has an “fi” sound to start. It was an interesting read!

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