scientist witness the first stages of a uncouth accent developing in Antarctica among its ever - changing universe of scientist who spend months together at inquiry Stations of the Cross on the isolated continent .
Antarcticahas no native population or permanent residents , but it does have a transitorycommunity of scientistsand backing staff who live there for part of the year on a rotational groundwork . In the summertime months , there are typically around5,000 peopleliving in Antarctica , but that drops to just 1,000 in the winter .
While most scientist are there to study things like climate and biodiversity , thisextreme bread and butter environmenthas create the perfect petri dish to research certain look of human behavior , culture , and sociolinguistics .
In 2019 , a team from the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich study the phonic change in accents among 11 “ winterers ” recruit from the British Antarctic Survey . This included eight people born and raised in England ( five in the Confederate States and three in the north ) , one somebody from the northwest US , another from Germany , and lastly an Icelandic mortal .
They record their vox at the beginning of thestudy , then made four more re - recordings at approximately six weekly intervals . During this time , they were working closely together , socialize with one another , and having limited liaison with the outside globe .
Throughout the arrest , the researchers noticed pregnant changes in their accents .
One of the main transformation was how the study grouping started pronounce their Word with tenacious vowel sound . moreover , there was grounds of lingual innovation in the group . Towards the final stage of their stay in Antarctica , the residents were enounce “ ou ” strait – like those found in the words “ flow ” and “ disco ” – from the front of their mouth , as fight back to the back of their throats .
The change in accent were pernicious , but important enough to be acoustically measure out and even prognosticate by a computational model .
" The Antarctic dialect is not really perceptible as such – it would take much longer for it to become so – but it is acoustically measurable,“Jonathan Harrington , study source and Professor of Phonetics and Speech Processing at the Ludwig - Maximilians University of Munich , told IFLScience .
" It ’s mostly an uniting of some aspects of the spoken accent of the winterers before they drop dead to Antarctica , together with an innovation , " added Harrington . " It ’s far more embryonic [ than conventional English accent ] given that it had only a myopic time to develop and also , of course , because it ’s only distributed across a small mathematical group of speakers . "
As this subject show , confining contact and closing off create the idealistic conditions for a new accent to rapidly develop . The inquiry also evoke that the winterers of Antarctica , all of whom arrived on the continent with their own regional accent , began to intimately shape each other ’s speech and behavior , whether they knew it or not . It ’s effectively the same phenomenon that turned the English stress into the American accent mark ( or Australian , Canadian , etc ) albeit on a much small and short scale .
It begs the question of what other novel dialect might come forth in response to mankind being insert to new social environments . One scenario is the possible development of a Martian accent .
" The discipline show that if you insulate a mathematical group of individuals , then they will begin to show the kickoff of a newfangled speak accent whose shape depends to a large extent on the accent characteristics of the utterer that went into the variety , " Harrington told IFLScience . " We ’d expect the same thing to encounter if astronauts ever went on a mission to Mars . "
If humans finagle to journey to the Red Planet andestablish a dependency on its dusty open , their close contact and isolation are likely to further a new stress very quickly . Over the course of generation , it could become very distinct from Earth - bound accent . After C , perhaps even a new Martian language could acquire .
An early version of this article was put out inAugust 2023 .
