Does our geographical location determine how we speak?

In short, Yes and no. It can be argued that for some people, dialect is strongly determined by where they live or grow up - ie accent and dialect features such as vowels or method of negation; however, some people's speech may be more influenced by age: this can especially be seen with the use of the filler 'like' among younger age groups. But this also could involve ethnicity as Americans have consistently been shown to use 'like' as a filler more than British people and people from New Zealand.On the other hand, speech may be influenced more by gender with women perhaps using more tag questions (Lakoff 1975) but especially with the case of gender results like these have been found to be biased by social stereotypes. More modern research supports a more 'diverse' view that men and women speak use the same language and that there is more variation within gender than between (Hyde 2005).So overall, it can be argued that a person's speech can be influenced by a number of factors but the strength of each influence varies based on the identity of an individual and how they want to portray themselves to the world, with geographical location being one of many factors that can determine how we speak.