Accent on Accents

I have long found it fascinating to contemplate the development of accents and dialects of spoken language. How does it happen?  So when I notice a video like https://www.youtube.com/shared?ci=zbkvnt42FL4 my attention is usually obtained. The lady conducting the work described in this video is skilled at mimicking UK accents which she has long studied. She makes the observation that the range in pitch of voice with which people in a region typically speak is directly reflective of the range of elevations in the local topography. According to her, folks in flat East Anglia speak in a monotone, whereas in southern Wales, which is a very hilly country, they speak with alternating highs and lows.  She remarks on other relationships between an accent and the culture of the people using it. An organized culture has a clearer and more clipped accent than one that isn’t as regimented. 

I wonder if there are accents among animals. Do Russian cows moo like Canadian ones?  If human accents can develop through isolation from inhabitants of other regions, does the same happen with animals?

And I wonder why American regional accents do not seem to reflect the accents of those peoples that first settled the respective regions.

The video poses the question of how the Edwardians spoke. We don’t have recordings from England to witness to that. What we do have though are a series of recordings from Germany. Two years into the First World War (I can argue that it wasn’t the first such war), the Germans recorded English prisoners of war reading for the purposes of making training recordings. The Germans wanted samples of regional accents and dialects to train those that would be settling the various regions of conquered Britain.