As an Aussie I can get why people from overseas wouldn’t be able to tell a Kiwi accent from an Aussie one, they’re very very close. As someone said there are regional differences in speech in the USA, but very few in Aus. The Kiwi and Aussie accent are almost the same one but with basically a regional variation between the two countries.
The main difference is in some vowels.
the Sth African accent however I would have thought is distinct enough on it’s own to be significantly different from Aussie/Kiwi.
To those Kiwi’s (or east Bondi-ians )who took the opportunity to disassociate with the OP, I’d like to support them by saying that the vast majority of Kiwi’s I’m met are quite nice people, and the place itself is friendly and relaxed.
The only real issue is that the number of people immigrating from East Bondi (New Zealand) to Australia to live is having a negative impact on the average IQ of both countries.
NZ seems way cooler to me than Australia. They banned nukes, and created Flight of the Conchords, which is good enough for me.
I could tell a Kiwi accent from an Australian accent if they were both in front of me and I had to choose. But by itself, it might be hard. I have trouble placing (some) accents in the US though, if that makes you feel any better.
American here. I used to be unable to distinguish many of the southern, urban accents of England from Australian. I’m getting better at it. The Geico Gecko (a mascot used by Geico, a US company, to market insurance products in the US) was given a Cockney accent for some reason. Lots of Americans think he’s supposed to be Australian.
I’ll admit to not being able to distinguish an Australian vs a NZ accent. I can only recall meeting one or two people from NZ and in all of these cases they spoke what sounded like an Oz accent.
There is certainly more than one accent in the US and Canada. Many of them are only subtly different from one another and it takes quite a bit of immersion and/or study to tell the difference. Most of the US’s most distinctive accents are on the East Coast where English has been spoken for hundreds of years and where local speech communities have become entrenched for that long. Places like California have only been largely English speaking for less than 200 years and do not have large variations in accent. Americans can typically tell many Bostonians and New Yorkers apart immediately by accent. Judging someone’s accent to figure out whether they are from LA or San Francisco, or Seattle vs. Portland, Oregon is ten times harder because there simply isn’t a San Francisco accent that is meaningfully different from an LA one.
New York and Boston are two cities that are renowned for their very distinctive local accents. Philadelphia and Baltimore, while also old colonial cities, don’t have as much of a distinguishing accent, but it is there if you know what to look for. Philly speech certainly is more distinctive and inherently Philly in nature than, say, Billings, Montana speech is distinctly Billingsesque.
One thing I do know (or have been led to believe) as an American is that New Zealand has some major cultural ties to Hawaii and that the Maori language is actually related to Hawaiian.
For the Aussies and Kiwis here - how well did South Park do Russel Crowe? Does he sound sufficiently Kiwi or did they just give him a vaguely Australian accent?
East Anglian, to me (American) actually sounds vaguely American, certainly more American than a BBC accent. Not as something you would likely hear a CNN newscaster using, but as an accent you might think might be out of a rural area of Upstate New York or New England, maybe the accent of a Maine fisherman or an old Vermont farmer.
In Once Upon A Time In Wonderland — where most of the actors are British, filmed in Canada, in an American production — the Red Queen’s accent is Home Counties, but as her former self, the peasant girl Anastasia, vaguely Northern common. I shouldn’t expect American audiences to even notice this shift; anymore than I could tell the difference between an Arkansas accent and an Alabamian.
What my grandfather told me was the old ‘Colonial’ accent in the 1930s and before, Sarf Afriker, Rhodesya and Nu Zeeland such countries — with the exception of Australia — shared. Kind of clipped.
The comedian Rhys Darby has a distinctive New Zealand accent.
When I visited New England a few years ago, I was amused to see places called things like Ipswich and Suffolk, so presumably that area was heavily occupied by East Anglians from the Old Country.
Although, to be fair, the whole map of New England reads like a map of Old England with all the place names in the wrong place.
Oh come now. We also have an admixture of incomprehensible names adapted from the Algonquin dialects of the area. (I saw a roadsign for "Poquonock –> Sheffield <— " the other day and felt that was a fine example of New England history.)
Philly and Bmore accents sound nothing alike to my ears, although I will concede that the Philadelphia accent has elements in common with all the other Northern Seaboard cities, as opposed to the Pittsburgh accent, which has almost, but not quite, a softer Southern bent. And Baltimore City proper has two distinct accents: that of the white working class (see Lt Dennis Mello in the Wire) and that of the black working class (see Snoop Pearson in the Wire).
I can’t tell a New Zealand accent from an Australian accent, but I always ran on the assumption that every-English speaking country had as many accents as at least America, if not Great Britain. That the accent just changed from city to city, or over the course of a two-hour drive. But then Claverhouse’s post reminded me of how plot points in Agatha Christie books would hinge on South Africans pretending to be Australians or being mistaken for Kenyans, and no one ever called them out on the basis of their accent. So, less variety in the Southern Hemisphere? That’s interesting.
Awwwww … look at the angry New Zealander. You need to relax. Go put some shrimp on the barbie, have a Foster’s, and find a nice sheila or two, mate. Oi! Oi! Oi!
There’s a character on Arrow, Deathstroke, who is supposed to be Australian, but is played by a New Zealander. He has not altered his accent in any way. It’s obvious to me, and I’m sure to many other viewers from down under, but I imagine nobody else notices or cares.
)who took the opportunity to disassociate with the OP, I’d like to support them by saying that the vast majority of Kiwi’s I’m met are quite nice people, and the place itself is friendly and relaxed.