Social and class differences

We can find differences in pronunciation (as well as in other fields of linguistic analysis) resulting from various factors including (in addition to geographical origin) one's age and sex, social class, educational background, occupation and personality. In addition, various situational factors influence pronunciation, such as the social relationship between speaker and hearer, whether one is speaking publicly or privately, and the purposes for which one is using language. Some people (who usually turn out to do well in phonetic training) find that in speaking to someone with a different accent their pronunciation gets progressively more like that of the person they are speaking to, like a chameleon adapting its colour to its environment.