I was thinking about writing about me, my thoughts or something like that but.. What if I told you a bit about what I’m studying at University? I’m learning different English accents around the world and I’ve decided to explain three accents that personally I think they are very interesting to produce and to understand as well. Here we start: let’s move to Australia.
Australian accent is a way of English language spoken in Australia. It is a relatively new dialect of English being just over 200 years old. It began diverging from British English shortly after the foundation of the Australian penal colony of New South Wales in 1788. In Colony period, Australia has been joined by military personnel and free settlers with their families. It is thought that children of the colonists created a new dialect that, after certain time, became Australian English. Children had contact with different dialects from England, particularly from London (Cockney).They created the new dialect from factors in the speech they heard around them. Although new settlers arrived, this new dialect of the children was strong enough to deflect the influence of new children. There is also evidence from early written sources that a new and distinct dialect was present in the colony by the 1830s, and history shows a language influence by Irish, Scots and Welsh, too. The first of the Australian gold rushes in the 1850s, began a much larger wave of immigration which would significantly influence the language. The influx of American military personnel in World War II brought further American influence; though most words were short-lived and only okay, you guys and gee have persisted and since the 1950s the American influence on language in Australia has mostly come from pop culture, the mass media, computer software and the internet.
Ok. That’s enough history, don’t you think? Let’s talk about some interesting things such as different accents.
According to the experts, there are three Australian accents. One is broad (think Crocodile Dundee or Steve Irwin). Most Aussies can speak this if they wish to, and some speak nothing else. Broad Australian is more common in the called “bush” or peripheral areas. The second version is referred to as general Australian, and this is typically used in radio announcers or on television. Then there is a dying form, educated Australian, which sounds closer to Received English. It is spoken by few people.
The "cultivated" style of English is fancied by most Australians to be indistinguishable from English, and it is fairly close: after a few months in Australia, most English people lose the ability to tell whether or not a "cultivated" speaker is English or Australian. Americans have problems in distinguishing that accent from the English accent. This style of "speaking properly" seems to be getting less common, if only because most "cultivated" speakers can and do use at least one other form of more local accent. The New Zealand accent is common in Australia, and can be hard to pick, even for an outsider who has been there for some time. Australians say it is easy: if we ask a New Zealander (called also “Kiwi”) to count to seven, the number between five and seven is sux, and lists are lusts. It's a subtle difference, and not really important. The 'Kiwi accent' is apparently more common in those from the South Island.
There are two other distinct forms of English that we detect in Australian accent. The "general Australian" is broader, and less "English", and it is more likely to contain references to manufactured products and cultural allusions and clever similes (such as "as mean as Hungry Tyson" or "as flash as a rat with a gold tooth"). "General Australian" usually involves less lip movement.
The broad Australian accent involves no lip movement at all (to keep flies out of the mouth, some say), more reliance on tones (perhaps because it carries over longer distances), and many impenetrable slang terms, including rhyming slang, often similar to (but differing from) Cockney rhyming slang. Australians think that it is a gross error to see their accent as deriving from Cockney, just because of a few fancied similarities in a few vowels and diphthongs.
Then there are the aboriginal words, which are names for places, animals or things that are used quite unconsciously, like tucker, which is food, and which may or may not be an aboriginal word, as well as bingey (stomach).
Last of all, there are words that are used in Australia in some way that the scholars of Oxford know not, that we will never find in the Oxford English Dictionary. Just as the Americans needed their Webster's, so Australians now have their own Macquarie Dictionary that tells them (and others) what they mean.
There are a few regionally-distributed phonetic features. For example centring diphthongs which are the vowels that occur in words like beard, air, sheer. In Western Australia we can hear diphthongs like the vowels in the words "ear" and "air" are pronounced as full diphthongs, it means that vowels require the tongue, jaw and lips to move during the speech. Those in the eastern states will tend to pronounce "fear" and "sheer" like "fee" and "she" respectively, without any jaw movement, while the westerners would pronounce them like "fia" and "shia". We can also hear a difference in pronunciation of the word “Salary” such as “salary” or “celery”. People who live in South Australia say "pool" and "school" like "pewl" and "skewl", while the rest of the Australian population pronounces them as they are spelt.
Australian English is also used by the majority of migrants who arrive during their childhood or early adolescence. The children of immigrant families generally adopt the majority speech patterns of the adopted country rather than those of their parents due to children's need to conform to their peer group. Another important point is that we have to think that over the past 20 years, there has been extensive sociopolitical change in Australia, too. All this, has influenced Australian English language to become as we know nowadays.
The vowels of Australian English can be divided into two categories: long and short vowels. The short vowels, consisting only of monophthongs, mostly correspond to the lax vowels used in analyses of Received Pronunciation. The long vowels, consisting of both monophthongs and diphthongs, mostly correspond to its tense vowels and centring diphthongs. Unlike most varieties of English, it has a phonemic lenght distinction that compresses, shortens or removes these features. Many speakers have also changed /dj/, /sj/ and /tj/ into /dʒ/, /ʃ/ and /tʃ/, producing standard pronunciations such as [ t͡ʃʰuːn] for tune. In colloquial speech intervocalic /t/ undergoes voicing and flapping to the alveolar tap [ɾ] after the stressed syllable and before unstressed vowels (as in butter, party) and syllabic /l/, though not before syllabic /n/ (bottle vs button [batn]), as well as at the end of a word or morpheme before any vowel (what else, whatever). In formal speech /t/ is retained. However, the alveolar flap is normally distinguishable by Australians from the intervocalic alveolar stop /d/, which is not flapped, thus ladder and latter, metal and medal, and coating and codingremain distinct; further, when coating becomes coatin' , the t remains voiceless, thus [kʌutn]. This is a quality that Australian English shares with some other varieties of English for example the called Linking /r/. Australian English is a non-rhotic accent, which means that it does not allow '/r/ sounds before pauses or before other consonants. So the words “car” and “card” will not contain the /r/sound. However, the /r/ sound can occur when a word that has a final “r” in the spelling comes before another word that starts with a vowel. For example, in “car alarm” the sound /r/ can occur in “car” because here it comes before another word beginning with a vowel. This is called a linking /r/. The words “far”, “far more” and “farm” do not contain an /r/ but “far out” will contain the linking /r/ sound because the next word starts with a vowel sound.
Another important point is Intrusive or Epenthetic /r/ . This is when an /r/ may be inserted before a vowel in words that do not have “r” in the spelling. For example, "drawing" will sound like "draw-ring" and "saw it" like sound like "sore it".
In movies we can hear the sound /j/ in young speakers where /tj/, /dj/, /sj/ and /zj/ become single affricate or fricative sounds: For example in "tube", and "tune", the /tj/ sound becomes the affricate "ch". An affricate also occurs in "dune", where it will be pronounced exactly like "june".
Diminutives which are used to indicate familiarity, are also important to know as a change of “original language”. Some common examples are arvo (afternoon), barbie (barbecue), smoko (originally a smoking break, now often used to refer to morning tea), Aussie (Australian) and pressie (present (gift)). The last two are pronounced /ˈɒzi/ and /ˈprɛzi/ respectively, never with a voiceless 's'.
This may also be done with people's names to create nicknames (other English speaking countries create similar diminutives). For example, "Gazza" from Gary.
Interesting, isn’t it? Let’s watch a video now. Could we do that accent? I think it’s a bit difficult but after a lot of practice it may be possible. Don’t you think?
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