Well no, human beings are not the only ones with accents. Other animals such as cows have them too. That is, at least, what emerges from the work done by a group of British linguists who claim that the moans of these ruminants vary depending on the area in which they live.
The research has been led by the professor of phonetics at the University of London , John Wells , who decided to launch it after hearing from the mouths of several English farmers that the roaring of their cattle changed substantially depending on the area of the country in which they lived.
One of them is Lloyd Green , a farmer based in Somerset County who, in an interview with the BBC, argued that these variations in pronunciation were due to the contact of animals with their owners: "It is the same with dogs. When closer you are of your animals, for them it is easier to catch the accent. "
For Green, who spends the day with his cows, it's very clear. His "mugen with the accent here . " Their bellows are those of the southwest of England and have little or nothing to do with those heard in other latitudes. Something that, he underlines, has been able to confirm by talking with other farmers: "When I talked with colleagues from other regions, they told me they had noticed the same thing as me."
Although some sounds like a joke, the existence of accents in certain species is something that has been studied for some time. As Wells recalls, it is a phenomenon that "is demonstrated in birds. You can find different accents within the same species, in different geographical locations" and especially "in small populations of animals, as is the case with a herd of cows, where identifiable dialectical variations that are spread between the group can be found. "
Despite what the Glastonbury farmer infers, which blames the presence of different accents in the herds of cows in contact with humans, the phonetician at the head of this study believes that the phonetic particularities that occur in the different vaccine communities proceed of contact with their peers.
This theory is shared by the linguistic expert at the University of Bristol Jeanine Treffers-Daller , who argues that the accent is influenced by the family. According to her, this is the main source from which we drink at the phonetic level during the speech learning phase, so "the same thing can happen to cows."
Other animals with accents
In addition to birds and cows there are other animals that, when communicating, pronounce with different accents depending on the area in which they grow. This was confirmed by the Aarhus University researcher in Denmark , Shane Gero , after spending six years listening to sperm whales living in the Caribbean or the Cambridge University doctor, Arik Kershenbaum , after analyzing 2,000 howls of dogs , coyotes , and various species of wolves on the planet. Soon, experts predict, they could be more.
According to the criteria of The Trust Project
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