Two viewpoints: ACCENTS In linguistics, an accent is a pronunciation characteristic of a particular group of people relative to another group. Accent should not be confused with dialect (q.v.), which is a variety of language differing in vocabulary and syntax as well as pronunciation. Dialects are usually spoken by a group united by geography or class. As human beings spread out into isolated communities, stresses and peculiarities develop. Over time these can develop into identifiable accents. In America, the interaction of people from many ethnic backgrounds contributed to the formation of the American accent. It is difficult to measure or predict how long it takes an accent to formulate. Accents in both America and Australia are derived from the British parent accent, yet the American accent remains more distant, either as a result of time or of external or "foreign" linguistic interaction, such as the Italian accent.[1] It could also be argued that the American accent is more fairly consistent with the manner in which English was pronounced by people from Britain - most especially people from Western parts of England - during the 1600s and early 1700s which presumably may not yet have been fully non-rhotic. Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa (particularly among whites of British settler descent) are more fairly recent transplants to their destinations so their accents are more-or-less in sync with the way English is spoken in Britain. In many cases, the accents of non-English settlers from Britain affected the accents of the different colonies quite differently. Scottish and Irish immigrants had accents which greatly affected the vowel pronunciations of certain areas in Australia and Canada. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accent_%28linguistics%29 DIALECT Many historical linguists view any speech form as a dialect of the older medium of communication from which it developed. This point of view sees the modern Romance languages as dialects of Latin, modern Greek as a dialect of ancient Greek, Tok Pisin as a dialect of English, and Scandinavian languages as dialects of Old Norse. This paradigm is not entirely problem-free. It sees genetic relationships as paramount; the "dialects" of a "language" (which itself may be a "dialect" of a yet older tongue) may or may not be mutually intelligible. Moreover, a parent language may spawn several "dialects" which themselves subdivide any number of times, with some "branches" of the tree changing more rapidly than others. This can give rise to the situation where two dialects (defined according to this paradigm) with a somewhat distant genetic relationship are mutually more readily comprehensible than more closely related dialects. This pattern is clearly present among the modern Romance tongues, with Italian and Spanish having a high degree of mutual comprehensibility, which neither language shares with French, despite both languages being genetically closer to French than to each other:[citation needed] French has undergone more rapid change than have Spanish and Italian. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialect

before there were languages, there were dialects and accents. standard language is an invention of nation states so that people had a standard everyone would understand and identify with. I mean, look at England, how many dialects are there? At some point in history, these dialects were unified and codified, and there you go: that's the standard, everything else is a dialect. Sometimes, dialects get so "powerful" they become their own language, it's a really thin line.