People pick up accents from the people around them, and also from the media they consume. It was once thought that the development of a distinguishable accent took a long time, but an accidental experiment shows that it can happen pretty fast, if the population is small enough, and they talk to each other a lot. That happened with a group of people from all over who spent the winter together in Antarctica when a linguist asked them to record their conversations. But the accent they developed in just a few months didn't last, because they all went back home, and other crews took their place.
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