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:

René Paul Viktor Kiparsky (born January 28, 1941, Helsinki, Finland) is a professor of linguistics at Stanford University. He is the son of the Russian-born linguist and Slavicist Valentin Kiparsky.

He was a student of Morris Halle at MIT, where he was also a professor from 1965 to 1984. His PhD thesis "Phonological Change" (1965) and his subsequent work on historical linguistics helped form the modern generative view of this area. He is the founder of Lexical Phonology and Morphology (LPM) and a noted Pāṇini scholar. He made fundamental contributions to the modern theory of poetic meter and morphosyntax.

His recent work is framed in Optimality Theory, integrating insights from LPM.

In 2007 he received the honorary doctorate of the German University of Konstanz.