I think this is exactly the point. I only have one American friend, yet I can easily distinguish an awful lot of American accents.
Not being able to distinguish Brummie from Strine - unbelievable as the concept seems - is purely down to having had probably no prior contact with Brummie ever (no doubt whatserface’s allegedly Mancunian accent in Frasier being the closest most American media gets to it), and not a fat lot of Aussie.
I’m wondering where all of you English chaps and lasses were when I lived in the UK and I was constantly being mis-identified as being from Scotland, Ireland, Wales, Germany, you name it. I mean, even Canada would have been close enough (I’m not from Canada, either, though!) 
I think part of the problem with just about anyone who says that they can identify someone from any part of the UK, Australia, NZ, etc. is that “regional accents” are generalizations that do not account for individual speech patterns. antechinus and everton refer to rising inflection (or “upspeak,” as I’ve heard it called) as a feature of Brummie and Aussie accents. But I’ve heard it used by people in certain cliques, most notably “sorority girls,” whose native accents didn’t typically include it. I can see how someone from, say, Oxford who spoke with upspeak might conceivably be seen by an outsider to be Australian, even though no Oxonian or Aussie, who would perhaps be looking for other vocal clues, would do so.
I also agree to a large extent with SmackFu on that it’s easier to tell someone who doesn’t share your speech patterns. How many people from outside of Pennsylvania, for example, would be able to tell the difference between people from Lancaster, Pittsburgh, the west-central coal counties, and Scranton? I could probably do so, but I couldn’t expect many from outside of PA to do it. And Pennsylvania is the same physical size, if not the same population size, as England proper.
I think that Aussie and Brit accents are quite easy to discern. But trying to pin down the differences would require an in depth linguistic analysis…sheeesh! It’s really no more difficult than being able to pick up on differences in the States. I’m from NW Ohio (no drawl) and people 1 hour south of here have a drawl…but oddly, not in Columbus. Even in the South, the drawls are different…I can tell a Kentuckian from a Virginian, from a Texan from a Georgian. Even in the city of Boston various accents abound.
Ok, I don’t have time to scroll back throught the responses but whoever said they have a difficult time with South African accents…I am right there with you… of all the accents in the world, that one gets me everytime. Anybody out there know of any cues to be able to tell if one is from S. Africa as oppossed to England?
Really? I don’t hear any similarities between the two at all. I’d think a Cockney accent would be the most likely; both are similarly … I dunno, extreme is the word that comes to mind.
As for the South African accent, I think it’s a lot closer to Aus/NZ than to England, but a bit duller.
While I do agree that some of the phrases and words chosen are different between Canadians and Americans, I definitely notice a difference in our accents.
I’m always amazed that you don’t have to go far across the border to notice differences. I just came back from spending the weekend in Northwestern Ohio, and they certainly have a different accent there and some of them commented on my accent. One year when I went to this same part of Ohio, the group of us at the sailing club played a game of homonyms while drinking beer and sitting round the fire. The regional accents resulted in pairs of homonyms that were strongly contested.
Also if you are talking about Canadian accents, don’t forget Newfoundland (not part of the Maritimes).
As far as comparing Brummie to Strine, listen alternatively to Ozzy Osborne and Steve Irwin.
For best results, try to catch snippets of Ozzie’s speech from the mid- to late-90s, if not earlier. Failing that, I understand that his recent speech is not easy to wade through. Still, Ozzy has had scattered moments of clarity on his family’s show – often when he is talking earnestly to his family, staff, or fans.
In the same vein, ignore when Irwin is excitedly expounding upon pouncing a “feisty croc” or some other such tense moment – he clearly plays to the camera. Listen to him when he is shown talking to his wife or his staff in behind-the-scenes settings. That’s Irwin’s speech at its most natural.
According to that site, the only accent worth mentioning in my area is a scouse accent.
:rolleyes:
Maybe it’s just me, but I always thought that those Canadians who pronounce ‘about’ differently than the majority of Americans pronounce it more like ‘aboat’ that aboot’. Same thing with ‘out’, ‘doubt’ etc. in many cases. Other than that, I have actually mistaken Canadians for Southerners a few times—to me at least, some seem to share the same cadence.
It took a bit, but thanks to years of experience, I’m able to tell a few British dialects apart, such as Birmingham vs. RSE vs. Cockney vs. Yorkshire etc., but I have had little to zero success with Australian accents vs. each other and those of the UK.
I also made the mistake of saying to a South-African lady that she sounded somewhat British. “Oh! Don’t say that,” she said somewhat amusingly.
Canadians don’t actually say “aboot” - and some will get quite annoyed if you suggest that they do! However, they don’t pronounce the word the same way as the average American, either.
After years of extensive analysis 
I’ve determined that what (some) Canadians do is pronouce both the “o” and the “u”, eliding them together.
For example, a typical US midwesterner will pronounce it “uh-bahwwwt.” A typical Canadian (or at least Eastern Ontarian) will say it, “uh-bahw-oot,” melding the last two syllables together into one. So yes, as Joe K says, it’s a bit like “aboat,” but not quite.
Bill Bryson’s book ‘Mother Tongue’, although a little difficult to wade through, is thorough in it’s dealing with accents and dialects. All English speaking accents in the ‘new world’ are that way because of where the immigrants came from in England.
So there are many commonalities in accent between different English speaking regions.
I must say that after having been away from NZ for a long time(although I’m British born with British accented parents) I noticed huge similarities between the Aussie accent and the American one. If you’re only vaguely listening, they can sound the same. Also, when first coming to NZ it took me a number of years to distinguish the difference between the Aussie and the Kiwi accent and yet, Aussies and Kiwis can hear the difference immediately.
In a recent study of accent, apparently the Queen’s vowels are becoming the same as Kiwi vowels!
Don’t mention Bill Bryson and linguistics at the same time, the two don’t go together!
Can you elaborate?
Most accents have something that typifies one of the most identifiable features.
Canadian aboot (which isn’t quite right), New Zealand fush and chups have both been mentioned in this thread. I would suggest a couple more:
South Africa is pronounced by South Africans as a sort of South Effrica.
And ask an Australian to say “party” it comes out more like “paaah-dy”
There’s already been a thread on it (in the pit I think), Bill Bryson is not a linguist and his book The Mother Tongue is responsible for the propagation of several urban myths (for example that the closest accent to Shakespearian English is in the New England area - it’s not, it’s in the West Midlands) about linguistics.
I’ve said it before, but A History of the English Language by Cable and Baugh is a much better bet.
Fair enough (I rather suspected I’d come a cropper sooner or later), although Garner did live in Texas for a while - that’s the excuse I’ll be sticking to.
Well the rising terminal intonation and “feesh and cheeps” are two things Brummie and Strine have in common, but I’ve often heard it said that the origin of Strine was Cockney + the climate. If you can do a Cockney accent and then squint as though you’re trying to get used to harsh sunshine it does go a bit Aussie.
I’ve noticed that South Africans have a tendency to pronounce “off” as “orf”, which is uncommon in the UK these days but turns up in films from the '40s and '50s. Of course, plenty of idiosyncracies you might notice when a South African speaks English are accounted for by the fact that it may well not be their first language.
Australian and South African sound similar to me (although I’d only mistake them for one another if the sample size was just a few short words); they both pronounce ‘yes’ as (something like) “yi-ess”
Interesting what you said about climate everton - I have often wondered if the clipped, guttural accents of northern Europe were brought about partly by a need to be heard above fierce winds.
Pardon?
+MDI: the person behind that site Narrad linked to said he didn’t claim his list was exhaustive and apologised if your area was left out. Why not drop him a line and tell him what people sound like where you’re from?
BTW, none of the Aussies have pointed out that there is more than one Australian accent. I wouldn’t know where to begin trying to tell a Queenslander from a person from Adelaide, but I bet they can.
Yup…and I am not even a native Australian.
The Aussie accent (and the Kiwi one) ae dependent on region/education a bit.
They are also, I suspect, growing more and more similar. As one moves northward in NZ it gorws more and more similar to the Australian, but not the nasal drawl that is caricatured so often. that is, thankfully, disappearing, whilst the Kiwi is (also thankfully) losing its inability to pronounce vowels
Well, not really. The rising inflection thing in Brummie is institutional.
The sometimes rising inflection you may associate with Australians is because of the UK’s strange addiction to Neighbours[sup]*[/sup] : it is a characteristic of teenage girls of a particular demographic.
[sub]For the benefit of 'Mericans who don’t know what Neighbours is (you lucky, lucky people) it is an appalling Australian soap opera featuring mostly younger people. It made Kylie Minogue’s name (dammit). And it stopped showing on Aussie telly long before they kept making it for the UK market.[/sub]
Saying Australians use a rising inflection is like saying a Californian accent is a Valley girl accent.
Largely disagree. There is as I stated above a difference along socio/regional/educational lines. A person who has a very strong strine accent is probably not a wealthy tertiary educated citydwelling professional. It would be rare to come across a stockman from outback Queensland who did not speak strine. But there are a million and one exceptions.
But as to regional accents, you’d lose your bet. I notice something different about Adelaide and Perth accents, when I’m there. People just sound slightly odd, but it’s so subtle that if you asked me to say what the difference is, I couldn’t. And if I just met a Perth person amongst a crowd of Brisbane people, I wouldn’t notice.
There are people who say they can tell East Coast (Brisbane/Melbourne/Sydney) accents apart but I’m sceptical. Firstly, I think really there is at most only a slight difference in idiom and attitude (if that) and secondly, I only ever hear people say they can pick the difference after they know the person is from Sydney/Melbourne/Brisbane.