AUSTRALIANS SPEAK DIFFERENTLY IN DIFFERENT PARTS OF AUSTRALIA

As in most English-speaking countries, there is no official governmental regulator or overseer of correct spelling and grammar. In England, accents vary according to class and region. In America, they vary according to race and region. Unlike America or England, Australia has no variance in speaking according to class, race or region. Instead, the accent varies according to ideology or gender. Two Australians can grow up side by side, go to the same schools, do the same job, but end up in speaking English by using different words, different syntax and with different accents. In fact, due to the gender variance, a brother and sister can grow up in the same house and end up in speaking differently.

The Australian accent is a non-rhetoric accent and is similar to South African and New Zealand English. About 21% of Australians reported speaking a language other than English at home. Australian Indigenous languages are spoken by less than 1% of the total population. The most common languages other than English are: Mandarin, Arabic, Cantonese, Vietnamese, Italian and Greek. Australian spelling is closer to British than American spelling. As with British spelling, the u is retained in words such as colour, honour, labour and favour. Let’s get things straight about the origins of the Australian accent. Aussie-speak developed in the early days of colonial settlement from a cocktail of English, Irish, Aboriginal and German. There is no official language in Australia. However, English is the most used language. Most Australians speak English as their first language. Melbourne and Sydney host about 65 percent of non-English-speaking expats who cumulatively make up some of the 240 different languages spoken in Australia.

Australia has three recognised accents. About ten per cent of Australians speak with what is known as a broad Australian accent. The broad Australian accent is usually spoken by men. 10 per cent speaking with British has pronunciation or cultivated English. Although some men use the pronunciation, the majority of Australians that speak with the accent are women. The broad Australian accent is typically associated with Australian masculinity. The broad Australian accent has cultural prestige for men because it creates an image that the man has the ability to relate to people from all walks of life, and will treat everyone with a sense of equality.Very few women use broad Australian accents, probably because the accent is associated with Australian masculinity. Around 80 per cent of Australians speak with what is known as a general Australian English accent. These accents are somewhat of a mix between the broad Australian and cultivated accents. Because they are comparatively neutral in ideology, most of the speakers believe that they don’t have an accent. The final ten per cent of Australians speak with what is known as a cultivated accent, which sounds a bit like Prince Charles.

There is a myth that Australians speak differently in different parts of Australia. For example, some people believe that all Queenslanders use the broad Australian accent. The stereotype is not based in fact. Queenslanders have the same variance in accent according to gender and ideology that is seen around Australia. Most migrants who speak English as their second language have an ethnic accent. The children of migrants, who speak English as their first language, usually use a broad, general or cultivated accent depending upon their ideology or gender. The ethnocultural dialects are diverse accents in Australian English that are spoken by the minority groups, which are of non-English speaking background.

It is a myth that Queenslanders speak differently to South Australians. It is also a myth that children of migrants have distinct accents. Nearly two generations after the First Fleet, 87 per cent of the population were either convicts, ex-convicts or of convict descent. With such strong convict foundations, it was inevitable that Australia’s linguistic traditions would be different from the mother country. The Australian strain of English is very musical. Tones are very important, and with the abbreviation of words to emphasize the stressed syllable, Australian English follows the general pattern of how English sounds when it is sung.

WORD STUDY

Accent articulation: A dynamic accent or stress accent is an emphasis using louder sound or a stronger articulation, typically most pronounced on the attack of the sound.

Acute accent: a mark (´) placed over certain letters in some languages to indicate an alteration of a sound, as of quality, quantity, or pitch, e.g., in risqué.

Agogic accent: In music, an accent is an emphasis, stress, or stronger attack placed on a particular note or set of notes, or chord, either as a result of its context or specifically indicated by an accent mark. Accents contribute to the articulation and prosody of a performance of a musical phrase.

American accent: All of these languages influenced American English, as did the English-speaking colonists’ origins in different parts of England, Wales and Scotland. Later, as metropolitan centers such as Boston and New York City had more contact with England, they adopted the then-trendy r-less accent of the English upper class.

Broad accent: A broad accent (sometimes equated with a local or vernacular accent) is popularly perceived as very “strong” or “thick”, highly recognizable to a particular population (typically within a particular region), and often linguistically conservative; almost always, it is the accent associated with the traditional speech.

Scottish brogue: A brogue is a reference to an Irish (occasionally Scottish) dialect of English, with a number of sounds changed that make it distinctive. A burr refers more to the trilling of the r (sometimes in the back of the mouth) that seems to be mostly a Scottish characteristic. Celtic is from French, from Latin, from Greek.

Strong accent: From Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English strong accent the way that someone pronounces words that shows clearly that they come from a particular area or country a strong German accent → strong. strong accent. Not merely that, I was putting my strongest accent on the syllable that wasn’t!

Foreign accent syndrome (FAS): Foreign accent syndrome (FAS) is speech disorder that causes a sudden change to speech so that a native speaker is perceived to speak with a “foreign” accent. FAS is most often caused by damage to the brain caused by a stroke or traumatic brain injury.

Regional accent: A regional or social variety of a language distinguished by pronunciation, grammar, or vocabulary, especially a variety of speech differing from the standard literary language or speech pattern of the culture in which it exists: Cockney is a dialect of English.

British accent: Received Pronunciation (the Queen’s English) Queen’s English is a term used to reference few dialects spoken by the attendees of public schools, such as Cambridge, Oxford, or Eton Universities.

Brummie accent: an English dialect that is spoken in the West Midlands of Birmingham in the United Kingdom. In the past, many British people have not held a brummie accent in a high aesthetic value.

Black country accent: The Black Country dialect is spoken in the city of Wolverhampton and the Black Country (That is to say the boroughs of Dudley, Sandwell, and Walsall), both of which are located in England. It also influences the accents of towns and villages in the rural counties to the north, south and west of the Black Country.

Cockney accent: A strong, non-rhotic (they don’t make ‘r’ sounds), slang-heavy accent spoken by the lower classes in Central London. This accent is like the London areas counterpart to the New Jersey accent in the New York Area of the United States, where people also don’t make the ‘r’ sound, is slang-heavy and is often spoken exclusively by the lower classes.

Cultivated accent: a cultivated person is well educated and knows how to behave politely. a cultivated man/voice/accent.

Dynamic accent: A dynamic accent or stress accent is an emphasis using louder sound or a stronger articulation, typically most pronounced on the attack of the sound. An agogic accent is an emphasis by virtue of being longer in duration.

Heavy accent: An accent is a stress or emphasis on a particular part of something, usually a word. Accent comes from the Latin accentus, which means “the intonation of singing.” We use accent for different kinds of emphasis in speech. In some foreign languages, the mark above a letter is an accent that signals how to pronounce it.

Plummy accent: used to describe a low voice or way of speaking using long vowels, of a type thought to be typical of the English upper social class: a plummy voice. a plummy accent.

Posh accent: The Queen’s English (also known as Received Pronunciation or ‘posh’) is a well-known English accent spoken by the royal family and other members of the upper classes in the UK. It is an accent which fascinates many non-native speakers and many English language students try to speak with a posh accent.

Prestige accent: A prestige dialect is the dialect that is considered most prestigious by the members of that speech community. In nearly all cases, the prestige dialect is also the dialect spoken by the most prestigious members of that community, often the people who have political, economic, or social power.

Accent neutralization: Accent reduction, also known as accent modification or accent neutralization, is a systematic approach for learning or adopting a new speech accent.

Rhotic accent: Relating to or denoting a dialect or variety of English (e.g. in most of the US and south-western England) in which r is pronounced before a consonant (as in hard) and at the ends of words (as in far) ‘rhotic and non-rhotic speakers’.

Welsh accent: Welsh English refers to the dialects of English spoken by Welsh people. In addition to the distinctive words and grammar, a variety of accents are found across Wales, including those of north Wales, the Cardiff dialect, the South Wales Valleys and west Wales.