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, whereas the word 'dialect' encompasses the broader set of linguistic differences. Often 'accent' is a subset of 'dialect'.

As human beings spread out into isolated communities, stresses and peculiarities develop. Over time these can develop into identifiable accents. In North America, the interaction of people from many ethnic backgrounds contributed to the formation of the different varieties of North American accents. It is difficult to measure or predict how long it takes an accent to formulate. Accents in the USA, Canada and Australia, for example, developed from the combinations of different accents and languages in various societies, and the effect of this on the various pronunciations of the British settlers, yet North American accents remain more distant, either as a result of time or of external or "foreign" linguistic interaction, such as the Italian accent.

Accent may refer to:

David Crystal OBE FBA FLSW (born July 6, 1941) is a linguist, academic and author.

Crystal was born in Lisburn, Northern Ireland. He grew up in Holyhead, North Wales, and Liverpool, England, where he attended St Mary's College from 1951.

Crystal studied English at University College London between 1959 and 1962. He was a researcher under Randolph Quirk between 1962 and 1963, working on the Survey of English Usage. Since then he has lectured at Bangor University and the University of Reading. He is currently an honorary professor of linguistics at Bangor. His many academic interests include English language learning and teaching, clinical linguistics, forensic linguistics, language death, "ludic linguistics" (Crystal's neologism for the study of language play), English style, Shakespeare, indexing, and lexicography. He is the Patron of the International Association of Teachers of English as a Foreign Language (IATEFL) and honorary vice-president of the Society for Editors and Proofreaders (SfEP). He has also served as an important editor for Cambridge University Press.

Tariq Rahman is a Pakistani linguist, academic, scholar and columnist. He was born on February 4, 1949 in Bareilly (U.P.) in India. The family migrated to Pakistan in 1951 where his father, Sami Ullah Khan, became instructor of mathematics, later rising to the head of the department, at the Pakistan Military Academy at Kakul, near Abbottabad. Tariq was educated at Burn Hall School (now Army Burn Hall College) and joined the army as an armoured corps officer in 1971. However, he decided to leave the army being a conscientious objecter to the military action in Dhaka, Bangladesh, and the war which followed. He finally resigned his commission in 1978 meanwhile obtaining three M.A degrees as a private candidate. In 1979 he got a British Council scholarship which enabled him to obtain M.A and Ph.D degrees from the University of Sheffield in England. He joined the academic profession as an associate professor in the English Department of Peshawar University in 1985. In 1987 he became professor and head of the English Department in the University of AJ & K in Muzaffarabad where he introduced linguistics. In 1989 he also got an M.Litt in linguistics from the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow. In 1990 he joined the National Institute of Pakistan Studies. In 2004 he was given the title of National Distinguished Professor by the Higher Education Commission of Pakistan. In the same year he was awarded the Pride of Performance for research. He was also the first incumbent of the Pakistan Chair at the University of California, Berkeley in 2004-5. In 2007 he was appointed the Director of the National Institute of Pakistan Studies, Quaid i Azam University, Islamabad, and in 2010 he was made professor emeritus there. In September 2011, after the end of his tenure as director of NIPS at QAU, he accepted the deanship of the School of Education at the Beaconhouse National University in Lahore. In November 2011 he was awarded the Humboldt Research Award for his past research work.