accents...

[warmcome]

What causes accents? English is english, but listen to all the differing
accents. People from Liverpool, Birmingham or even our own Cork, the
way they speak sounds strange, we think "are they putting it on?"or
"do they speak like that all the time?"

Any theories to why accents exist?

[Monkeynut]

I gave it a Wiki and came up with this ...

In linguistics, an accent is a manner of pronunciation peculiar to a particular individual, location, or nation. An accent may identify the locality in which its speakers reside (a geographical or regional accent), the socio-economic status of its speakers, their ethnicity, their caste or social class, their first language (when the language in which the accent is heard is not their native language), and so on. Accents typically differ in quality of voice, pronunciation of vowels and consonants, stress, and prosody; although grammar, semantics, vocabulary, and other language characteristics often vary concurrently with accent, the word 'accent' refers specifically to the differences in pronunciation and the word 'dialect' encompasses the broader set of linguistic differences; often 'accent' is a subset of 'dialect'.

Basically it says that the Cork accent is the way it is because Cork people are missing a vital gene ...... the lack of this gene makes them think that Cork is the capital of Ireland.