Seems like it. Australian hicks are north, but they’re still closer to the equator, so your theory holds. In fact, we have a word for the process of getting slow and a little mad when you move to the far north: to ‘go troppo’ (from ‘tropical’). A little affected by the sun. Actually I think it’s less to do with the sun directly, and more to do with life being easier in the warmer areas of the globe, generally.
People from the biggest city are rich, obsessed about money, uppity, and boorish, but people from the capital are usually just boring.
Actually, the City of L.A. proper and western suburbs such as Santa Monica and Beverly Hills have a reputation for Democratic/liberal voting–which is largely accurate. This goes way beyond the Hollywood crowd. Arnie’s propositions looked like winning until the Los Angeles County returns came in.
But the eastern and northern suburbs have a rep for conservative politics and culture, which also is largely deserved.
Going back a few centuries, to Outremer (Crusader-ruled kingdom of Jerusalem): Muslim writers often remarked on the sexual licentiousness of Frankish (European) women. Usama ibn Munqidh famously describes a scene where a Frankish man of his acquaintance came home to find his wife in bed with another man. When the husband demanded to know what was going on, the stranger replied that he was tired, and merely laid down in the bed to rest. When the husband asked why his wife had gotten into the bed with him, the stranger said, “The bed is hers. How could I prevent her from getting into her own bed?” Apparently satisfied with this response, the husband merely warned them not to do it again.
On the other hand, the poet Ibn al-Qaysarani was so taken by the “blue-eyed” beauty of a Frankish woman that he wrote the following poem:
I am captivated by a Frankish woman
A fragant breeze lingers on her.
In her clothing there is a soft branch
And she is crowned by a radiant moon.
During the First Crusade, the rhomaioi (Byzantine Greeks) were scandalized by the clean-shaven faces and long hair of the Crusaders. Later, this became a popular trend in Byzantine culture; a couple of centuries later, Niketas Choniates disdainfully notes the long womanish locks worn by Greek men. The rhomaioi also considered the Russians to be cruel, the Armenians and Arabs treacherous, and the Franks to be greedy, uncultured, and violent.
But seriously Melbourne has a huge migrant population, though bugger all Kiwis. Are you saying the Bondi bunch is taking over?
While the differences seem tiny to anyone else, the differences in the accents are very apparent to NZers and Aussies. Simple words like ‘dance’ tell the difference. Aussies pronounce that word very much like Americans (or more correctly like the Irish). Kiwis pronounce it more like the English.
Though the major accent influences in both countries is the English, it is the most prominent secondary influence that made the difference. To Australia it was the Irish. To NZ it was the Scottish.
That influence is the only difference in (most) Pakeha-Kiwi accents; in the South they roll their R’s- just like their Scottish forebearers. In the wild unplanned North they forgot how to roll R’s because they were too busy NOT shagging sheep.
You’re not only winning the battle, but it looks like the entire bloody war might go your way. I’ve posted this before I think, but I once heard a linguistics expert talking about the Kiwi accent, and how he believes it is the English language’s default accent. The theory is that up until the 1950s, the New Zealanders sounded quite English. The Australian radio and TV presenters did too, but not the population because we were larger, of convict (generally working class) ancestry, and we had time to develop our own accent (Irish-influenced, as you say). In New Zealand though, even the average Joe in the street sounded a little British. Suddenly, as the 60s loomed, and holding on to Mother England’s apron strings became unfashionable in both countries, Australia just reverted completely to its own accent (including the radio announcers), but NZ suddenly found it didn’t have one. So this basic accent appeared, almost as a rush job. This guy went on to say that over the decades and possibly centuries, he believes every English-speaking country in the world will develop Kiwi characteristics in their speech, due to the globalisation of the language smoothing off the corners of various regional speech patterns. I don’t know whether he’s right or not, but it’s an interesting theory.
I do love a good, educated Kiwi accent. It’s nice to listen to.
Not true of England - hicks are Northerners, the sophisticated from the South. My family name is Cooke - apparently the Cooks in the South didn’t want to be associated with the Cooks in the North, so added the ‘e’ on the end!
My dad is proud of being Czech (mostly Bohemian, but with some Moravian ancestry). He’s glad the Czech Republic and Slovak Republic are now separate countries, as opposed to being combined into the nation of Czechoslovakia. To him, the Czechs (urban and educated, professional) are more cultured, while the Slovaks (farmers and factory workers) are less intelligent. He believes that the difference is intrinsic, but was magnified by the fact that during the time when both peoples were under Austro-Hungarian domination the Czechs looked to Austria (Vienna pastries, Mozart’s compositions). Meanwhile, the Slovaks were more influenced by Hungarian culture (“chicken paprikas and the csárdás”).
I once told Dad that a co-worker of mine (who was of Slovak ancestry) had make a comment about “the Czechs and Slovaks” being the best of the Slavs. Dad’s response was: “Only a Slovak would make a comment like that, bringing in the Czechs to lift himself up!”
(I hasten to add that although Dad is fond of ethnic humor and invoking stereotypes, he’s always gotten along well with people of all backgrounds – he just honestly believes that such clichés as the “thrifty Scotsman” and the “drunken Irishman” each contain more than a grain of truth.)
Oh I, as a Queenslander, have to disagree. The Queensland accent is very distinctive and not at all like the classic 'strine accent. A number of my friends and I have been mistaken by Americans for South Africans. The difference between the Sydney accent and the Queensland accent is that we speak more slowly up here, but we also rely even more on the unstressed, neutral vowel. Steve Irwin’s accent seems to drift in and out of the classic Melbourne accent, where an “i” can be subtsituted for any vowel at any time and all words are spoken at a million miles an hour.
Arthur Miller’s play A View from the Bridge has a Sicilian character named Mario who is there to be the stereotype of the vengeful, deadly Sicilian. Again, unusual in that this was an American play but Mario was shown with a European stereotype of Sicilians, instead of being a Mafioso, which is the American stereotype of us.
Intriguingly, the American (U.S.) Northeast was settled largely from the South of England, while the Old South was settled largely from the North. So here we have a classic case of the “exception that proves the rule”; the same stereotytpe carried across the Pond, but reversed as to which region fell into which stereotype.
Another similar example is the pronunciation of the letter ‘H’ - in England it is seen as working class to say ‘haich’ (you know like whatser name Doolittle does) but in Australia it is seen as more educated and classy!
It used to be that whether a person aspirated the haitch in Australia was more to do with whether he had a Catholic upbringing (they did aspirate) or a Protestant one (they didn’t).
So possibly because of the Irish immigrant influence, to be Catholic was a better thing status wise? I noticed when I lived in Sydney a certain snobbery involved with people who had attended Catholic schools.
Could be, but I suspect it’s more modern than the Irish influence (and that was often seen as a working class thing to avoid being associated with, in the old days). Many non-Catholic families send their kids to Catholic schools to “get a better education”. Aspiring families see Catholic schools as the first step on the rung out of the public education system. These schools are unibuitous in the suburbs, and often the only other private education alternative is one of the $$$$$ private grammar schools, usually inconveniently far away.