Are there big regional accent differences in Australia?

Factual Questions
21

Sorry, that wasn’t well put. I was trying to convey how easy it was for me to spot, and yet clearly how hard for you. As Blake writes, the clue is the “ul” which is very Mancurian, but not Australian, and the cadence. Interestingly I put the “ul” ahead of the cadence, whereas Blake does the opposite, which perhaps underlines differences in the ear even for us. Given I have relatives in that part of the world I am probably influenced to hear different parts.

Britain is pretty special in that accents change so dramatically. I suggested that maybe Birmingham, forgetting that although I know people from Birmingham, who are quite well spoken and much closer to RP, the proper Brummie accent is different again.

22

In wandering about YouTube I came across this. Have a listen. Comments from everyone would be most interesting.

23

I’m English but I have no difficulty usually in distinguishing a Kiwi accent from an Aussie one. It’s in words like apple that the New Zealand accent is most distinguishable, it’s more epple than apple. I first picked up on it watching Aussie and NZ soaps years ago.

24

Definitely not a pure Australian accent.

My first impression was Kiwi with a touch of either Scandinavian or US/Canadian. Then after listening to it a couple more times I’m thinking Australian who has had speech therapy to correct a lisp or something.

The divergence from Australian is most clear in the way that his words are clipped. Australian is famous for running words together. Or, to put it another way “Au strayinis
famous f’runningword stogether”. This bloke doesn’t seem to do it at all, which is something I’ve never heard in any accent, but I have noticed with people who have had major speech therapy and are carefully pronouncing all their words.

This is highly noticable in his pronunciation of the 't" in “not”. At first I thought it was a glottal stop, which is a very Cockney trait and very un-Australian, but when I listened more closely I realised that it’s a really strong under-pronunciation because he doesn’t run words together. Australians will almost always run words together, so “not an Australian accent” becomes “no tanAustralia naxcent”. That makes it very easy to pronounce the “t” directly before the “a”. Because this bloke clips “not” it’s hard for him to pronounce the following “a”, and the “t” becomes almost silent as a result.
There are also a couple of other oddities.

Ironically his pronunciation of “Australian”, has a distinct rhotic “r” that is never, ever found in Australian. This sticks out like dog’s balls when he says “personally I think I have an Australian accent”. If you clipped out just those words, most Australians would assume it was a Yank speaking. “Perrrrsonally” “Austrrrrralian”. Distinctively not Australian pronunciations.

His vowels are all shifted slightly to the front of the mouth, giving him a sort of faux-plummy sound. This shift is why I thought NZ, but it’s almost the exact opposite of NZ. Instead of the Australian “people are ahsking” he pronounces it almost as “people are orsking”. It sounds very similar to the stereotypical English upper-class pronunciation you would expect in words like “dance”. That’s quite jarring considering that the last trace of that in Australia is the "Newcassel’ “Newcarsel” shibboleth. Similarly “are you from England” becomes “Ahhr you frem Uhngland”.

I think it’s a combination of the clipped words and the slightly plummy vowel sounds that is probably leading to people assuming he’s English. It sounds almost like an over-affected upper class accent in places.

But for all that, the accent is clearly still 99% Australian/NZ. It just has a trace of something else.

25

Kiwis move *all *their vowels back in the throat, not just the ‘a’. Or to put it another way

Kaways mauve ull thuhr vewells buck en the throht, nut jest the “e”. :smiley:

Although I have been told that the most other English speakers have moved their vowels forwards, and the NZ pronunciation hasn’t changed.

26

Doesn’t sound purely Australian. The way he says “ask” makes me think South African.

27

Definitely an odd accent. Sounded like elocution lesson English to me with a couple of distinct Australian features like the way he says t and the end of a word and just a trace of the uptalking thing at the end of his sentences. I would say he either went to a posh school or had posh parents and was discouraged from develping an Aussie accent as a child. I’m seriously puzzled that he can’t hear the difference between the way he speaks and the way many other Australians speak. Interestingly however to me the way he says “Australian” is one of the most Australian things he says. I think it’s the cadence and the middle “a”.

28

Most? I thought it was the least. The odd pronounciation of “Australian” is what makes him stand out most as having an odd accent. On that word alone I’d have guessed he was American.

29

You’re having a bubble.

30

There is an ABC documentary The Sounds of Aus that pops up on TV now and again. Review and ABC Page.

It is a fascinating account of the history of the Aussie accent and thanks to the presence of John Clarke is good fun.

In it the experts agree that there is virtually no variation in regional accents. An old tape is played of a Queenslander who lived his whole life in a tiny fishing village yet sounds like someone from the city. This is why linguists considered Australian English the “purest” form of English.

Rachel Griffiths and a speech expert explain why Australians can so readily adopt other accents but it is hard to fake an Aussie accent

A quick look show that recently the whole thing was made available here. Well worth your time.

31

I can usually tell by words like “fish”, which a Kiwi pronounces like “fush”.

32

To my American ear, this clip of Gillard speaking sounds pretty much like Nicole Kidman or Toni Collete. Which probably means I can’t hear the difference in Australian accents, because they probably all have clearly different accents to you!

I can definitely tell the “broad” accent is different, and yes, that’s the Irwin/Hogan “look at me, mate: I’m Aussie!” accent. I don’t mistake that one for English at all.

I feel like maybe there’s a difference in the final two, but I need longer clips to be sure.

The middle one (General) is what I hear from most Australian actors working for American audiences. The aforementioned Kidman and Collette, Simon Baker in interviews and when his accent slips in his show (which it’s doing a lot more lately!)… When any of them plays “posh”, it starts to sound more and more English to me, even if those broad vowels still sneak through; I think maybe that’s the third clip (Cultivated).

33

I would actually agree. The word “personally” sticks out a little as not sounding American, but the rest I could mistake for another American talking. Other than that, there are some parts that sound obviously Australian (the words “go” and “so” especially) and some that sound high-class British to me. I’m glad to read actual Australians saying it doesn’t sound completely like an Australian accent; maybe there’s hope for me yet.

34

Menzies, even in 1966, sounds (to me, anyway) cultured Australian, so toned down as to scarcely sound Australian at all, save in certain intonations. People of Menzies’ generation still thought of Britain as ‘home’, even if they’d never spent time there, and looked to Britain for most of their cultural reference points. Another example is Air Vice Marshal Donald Bennett, who scarcely sounds Australian at all. I wouldn’t expect to hear modern Australians sounding like that.

35

I was raised in Australia, i lived in England for two years, Canada for two years, and i’ve now lived in the United States for over a decade.

I simply can’t pick where an Aussie is from, based on accent alone, the way that i can with a whole bunch of Brits and Americans. I can pick a Liverpool accent from a Birmingham accent or a Geordie accent. At one time, i could tell Yorkshire and Lancashire apart quite easily, although i may have lost that skill. And north versus south in England is pretty easy, for the most part. I also know what a west country accent sounds like. And a bunch of others.

In the United States, i can pick some of the more obvious differences quite easily. It’s relatively easy to tell if someone is from the south, although i sometimes have trouble telling exactly where they’re from. Quite a few city accents like Boston and New York and Baltimore (and variations within those cities) are also familiar to me. I can also usually pick a Canadian accent, although most of my experience is in western Canada, and not in Ontario or Quebec.

I can’t make any of the same sort of distinctions in Australian. The best i can do, sometimes, is distinguish rural from urban. I grew up in the suburbs, but i went to an agricultural boarding school with a lot of kids from western New South Wales, and as a whole their families’ accents were a little broader or “harsher” than what i was used to. But even this isn’t an infallible guide, because plenty of working- and lower-middle-class people from city and suburban areas speak in pretty much the same way.

I’ve had people say to me in the past that they can tell a Sydney accent from a Melbourne one, or that they can definitely distinguish a unique Adelaide accent, but i just don’t buy it.

Interestingly, some of the most distinctive Aussie accents, to my ears at least, are to be found among post-WWII immigrant communities. Greek Australians often have a particular Aussie accent that is quite easy to pick. It has been parodied a lot on TV, often by Greek Australians, but i’ve known second-generation Australians of Greek background and their accent was both distinctively Australian but also distinctively different from “regular” Australian. Before i moved to the United States, i lived near one of the main Italian neighborhoods in Sydney, and many Italian Australians also had an accent that was clearly Australian but inflected by their ethnic background.

36

Is there a tendency of Australians to increase their accent when away from home, like the tendency of Texans to become far more Texan when not actually in Texas?

37

In “The King’s Speech,” the king’s speech therapist was supposed to be Australian, but sounded exactly like all the Brits in the movie. Did Australian accents sound just like British accents at one point?

38

The therapist did have an Australian accent but not a broad one. And Australian accents tend to water down fairly quickly in the UK because there is so much similarity, IME.

39

Are you kidding?

40

We keep saying things like this :slight_smile: and the answer of course is “no”. I think there is something fundamentally interesting here. There is clearly enough of a divide in the accents between the US and some other English speaking groups that we can’t reliably distinguish accents in the other group. I suspect that it does cut both ways, and that whilst Australians are bemused at an inability to pick us from Brits, we are likely hopeless at picking nuances in US accents. Picking Canadian from a generic US is something we seem poor at for a start. North South East and West accents in the US are not hard, but one suspects that there are aspects we are oblivious to.