Scientists witness the first stages of a uncouth accent develop in Antarctica among its ever - convert population of scientists who pass month together at inquiry stations on the isolated continent .
Antarcticahas no aboriginal population or permanent resident physician , but it does have a transitorycommunity of scientistsand financial support stave who exist there for part of the year on a rotational fundament . In the summer months , there are typically around5,000 peopleliving in Antarctica , but that drop to just 1,000 in the wintertime .
While most scientists are there to consider things like mood and biodiversity , thisextreme living environmenthas created the everlasting petri dish to explore sealed aspect of human behavior , acculturation , and sociolinguistics .
In 2019 , a team from the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich analyse the phonic variety in accents among 11 “ winterers ” recruited from the British Antarctic Survey . This included eight people born and raised in England ( five in the south and three in the N ) , one person from the northwest US , another from Germany , and lastly an Icelandic someone .
They recorded their interpreter at the beginning of thestudy , then made four more re - recordings at close to six weekly intervals . During this sentence , they were working nearly together , socializing with one another , and having limited touch with the outside world .
Over the course of the stay , the researchers noticed significant change in their accents .
One of the master displacement was how the study group commence pronouncing their words with longer vowels . Furthermore , there was grounds of lingual innovation in the grouping . Towards the end of their check in Antarctica , the residents were pronouncing “ ou ” sound – like those found in the words “ flow ” and “ disco ” – from the front of their back talk , as opposed to the back of their throats .
The changes in accent were subtle , but significant enough to be acoustically value and even foreshadow by a computational example .
" The Antarctic accent is not really perceptible as such – it would take much longer for it to become so – but it is acoustically measurable,“Jonathan Harrington , study author and Professor of Phonetics and Speech Processing at the Ludwig - Maximilians University of Munich , severalise IFLScience .
" It ’s mostly an amalgamation of some vista of the spoken accent of the winterers before they went to Antarctica , together with an innovation , " added Harrington . " It ’s far more embryonic [ than conventional English accents ] given that it had only a shortsighted time to develop and also , of trend , because it ’s only distributed across a small group of speakers . "
As this study shows , close contact and closing off make the idealistic condition for a new accent to chop-chop germinate . The research also advise that the winterers of Antarctica , all of whom get on the continent with their own regional accent , get down to closely mold each other ’s speech and behavior , whether they know it or not . It ’s efficaciously the same phenomenon that turned the English accent into the American accent ( or Australian , Canadian , etc ) albeit on a much smaller and unretentive scale .
It beg the question of what other novel accent might come forth in response to human beings being introduced to new social environments . One scenario is the possible developing of a Martian speech pattern .
" The study depict that if you isolate a group of individuals , then they will begin to show the beginning of a young spoken accent whose form depend to a large extent on the accent characteristics of the speakers that went into the mixture , " Harrington told IFLScience . " We ’d bear the same thing to happen if astronauts ever belong on a missionary post to Mars . "
If humans finagle to travel to the Red Planet andestablish a colony on its dusty surface , their close contact and isolation are likely to further a Modern accent very quickly . Over the course of generation , it could become very distinct from Earth - bound accent . After one C , perhaps even a novel Martian language could develop .
[ H / T : Human.1011 ]
