weather, climate and all this effect speaking style,accent?

i just wanted to know as if there has been any research carried on from this perspective that weather condition climate and all this sustains or effects a certain speaking style or accent of group of ppl living in that area???
For e.g. the white men of South Africa their english accent seems to be more like the local languages spoken there though they are of Britain origin??
Like aussies they have a very chewed sorta mouth movement and that certain hardness in thier speaking style????

There was a French linguist in the late 18th century, just before the revolution, who proposed that human languages were influenced by climate. I forget his name. He has had no successors that I know of since then but this does not necessarily mean that he was wrong.

There has been a slightly stronger theory in history, largely advanced by Australian historian Gordon Childe (1892-1957) in the 1930's that climate has influenced human history a great deal accounting for the rises and falls of many civilizations including Egypt, Rome, monastic Ireland and the Pueblos and Mayans. In the case of languages, more research simply needs to be done.

Gordon Childe (also known as Vere Gordon Childe).

thankyou Brennus you ve been so kind answering that for me Thankyou

I can't imagine that such a theory is given any credence today.

Accent and speech style can depend on many things, but I don't think climate is one of these. A somewhat less unsicientific and arbitrary assumption would be that accents and speech style have something to do with the temperament of the speakers, or their general lifestyle, or their preference of a certain way of pronunciation over another, for whatever reason (I will elaborate more on this last point below). On the whole, any theory that relates accent differences to non-phonological, non-psycholinguistic or non-sociolinguistic factors should be dismissed as lacking any credit.

I tend to think that one thing which influcences accents is a general tendency towards producing utterances with the least possible effort (as perceived by a certain group of speakers), or the elimination of sound clusters which are perceived as hard to pronounce (although there might be some exceptions from this latter tendency, such as Georgian or some Slavic languages, which tend to stick to unusual consonant clusters). One reason for the difference between various accents of the same language is that various groups of speakers find different ways of achieving this. One example I could give is the "cot-caught merger", which seems to reflect the fact that for many speakers pronouncing both groups of words with a long back vowel is the easiest way. Another example could be the nasalisation of vowels originally occurring before nasal consonants in Neo-Latin languages.

Finally, from a sociolinguistic perspective, people may start speaking in a certain manner because they want to distance themselves from other social groups. Perhaps the best and most famous example of this is the Great Vowel Shift (and a somewhat parallel phenomenon of this in Dutch), which according to some theories might have at least partly resulted from a tendency among the upper classes to distinguish themselves from the lower social groups by their pronouncing vowels with a higher tongue position. Afterwards, this deliberate or half-deliberate change might have been adopted by the lower classes as a tool of upward mobility, and therefore it became more general than originally intended (and, incidentally, messed up the fairly consistent relationship between speech and spelling characteristic to the Middle English period).

>>by their pronouncing vowels with a higher tongue position<<

A slight correction: with a higher tongue position except in case of the /i/ -> /@i/ shift, which reflected a reverse tendency (an example being the pronunciation of "mice").

this doesn't give any information for a report.

<<I can't imagine that such a theory is given any credence today.>>

Exactly. Such theories are not seen as credible today, to say the least.

<<For e.g. the white men of South Africa their english accent seems to be more like the local languages spoken there though they are of Britain origin?? >>

If that's true then it's because of contact between English speakers there and those of indigenous languages there. It's not due to weather.

<<Like aussies they have a very chewed sorta mouth movement and that certain hardness in thier speaking style????>>

But then wouldn't you expect there to be widely different Australian dialects depending on the geographical region in Australia? In terms of weather and geography Australia is incredibly diverse (so there's no one unifying weather characteristic that would unite all of Australia, even if weather did influence dialects) yet its regional dialectal variation is not.