Accents

Yesterday, I found a Youtube video from a guy imitating 32 different English accents. It was, quite frankly, impressive. How did I find it? Well, it all started with me and my boyfriend watching some random videos and stumbling upon one about a prank call a young girl did with a Dublin-based demolishion company. The accent struck me as interesting, so I wanted to see if that was really a Dublin accent. Thus, the Youtube search.

What struck me as interesting was the following: We started listening to the prank call, and I somehow was reminded of how Dutch sounds to me, a German native, just that the language was English. It was not really English spoken with a Dutch accent, though. I was intrigued. The Youtube video with the 32 different accents revealed that apparently, most of the Irish accents remind me of Dutch. I can't really explain this, but I definitely like their accent (and I like the sound of Dutch too).

On another note, I was thinking about different accents in various languages recently and I noticed that it often seems to be the southern part of the country which has a very distinct accent or dialect. It's like this in Germany, in the United States, in France, and certainly in Italy too. I would be interested in hearing about other countries too, so if any of you know about other countries and their various accents, I would really appreciate your insight.

It makes me wonder, though, why accents develop in the way they do. It certainly has to do with the influences from other languages, but is that really all? I mean, those countries I mentioned above have more than one shared border with other countries, not only on their south side. Germany, for example, is surrounded by seven different countries, whereas the two southern countries even speak German (Austria and Switzerland). France shares borders with Spain in the south, and with several other countries in the north and north-east. Italy has no shared border at all in the south.

Can anyone of you shed some light on this phenomenon?