How do accents develop?

How do dialects and accents develop?

• To clarify for example, I don't see how 'New Jersey' becomes 'New Joysey'. Not that just that, but with dialects of other languages, it makes it difficult to learn the actual language. i.e. Trying to learn Greek with someone from Crete.

• Answer:

  Sounds are always constantly shifting into other sounds; linguists call it sound change. Remember that languages are artificial constructions; just arbitrary groupings of similar patterns of speech among people. In countries like Europe governments have been around for a long time to enforce a standard language on their people, so this fact seems less obvious, but if you look in a place like Africa it's much less clear where you should draw the line between one language on another. I'm not a linguist, but this is my guess on why sound change happens: It probably happens because the sounds can't always be perfectly learned; e.g. children often have trouble pronouncing sounds like 'r' and if there's no standard language being enforced by the state that might stick with them and get transferred to the next generations. It can also happen because some sounds are easier to say than others. For example one very common sound change is where a voiceless consonant between two vowels, e.g. 'ata', becomes voiced 'ada' because that's easier to say when you have two vowels around it (vowels are always voiced). So basically language is always changing naturally. Standardised languages obscure this fact a bit but the force of sound change is still strong enough to create dialects and accents, and over long periods of time, fully-fledged languages.