Another common accent variation is the ethno-australian accent. Very common in western Sydney, parts of Melbourne and other parts of the country. It's a very distinct accent that you can tell right away. It's usually people who have parents or family from another country who were raised in a community surrounded by ethnic accents, usually Greek, Italian or middle Eastern countries like Lebanon etc. So those inflections from their families accents creep into their Australian accents and form a particular blended accent. You'd be surprised if you heard a thick western Sydney accent. You'd be like "is that an Aussie accent!?" There's also an Indigenous Australian accent which is more subtle than the ethno-australian accent but still can hear some differences. I have a general accent. The "cultivated" accent you will hear more often from people in South Australia where their accent and certain pronounciations are more British/English leaning. And of course there's some who just like to speak with a posh accent lol. Some of the broad accents make me cringe. Like Julia Gillard. Even our current PM mumbly and nasally at times...if you're going to be in public office, you don't have to be posh but at least learn how to announciate a bit better. I wouldn't worry too much about city or place pronunciations, there's plenty of American ones we would get wrong. And Melbourne honestly makes no sense the way we say it. As someone said imagine if the movie "The Bourne Identity" was pronounced the way we say Melbourne 😂🙈 Also sometimes it's a person's accent not a pronounciation thing. Aussies love to correct Americans if they pronounce Cairns with an American R instead of a soft Aussie R. But I disagree with this. If I went to America I wouldn't pronounce New York with an American R. And highly doubt people would stop me and correct me and make me say it with and American R lol. Sometimes we need to chill a bit and remember it's just that the person saying it, has a different accent.
Another thing which confuses most Americans, is the way Ockers in conversation will say Ye Na (Yes and No ) at the same time to describe something. there was an ad on TV recently with Shaquille O'Neal asking some Aussies about which horse to place a bet on. The answer Ye Na confused him considerably. His response was " is that a yes or no ? ". The ad was for a website called Sports Bet.
Hi Dar, American expat living in Japan for 40 years now (former Associate Prof of Applied Linguistics). You have a good ear, and I am enjoying reading the comments here too. Just a few anecdotes and an observation ... I grew up in rural North Carolina (just outside Greensboro), and had a definite southern drawl. But went to UNC-W to study marine biology, and among my fishing adventures, came across people native to the Outer Banks (not 'snowbirds' with their posh vacation bug-outs), but more like Harker's Island ... and could barely understand them. There was a movie some years ago with, Jon Voight (dad of Angelina Jolie) called 'Conrack', an autobiography about a teacher assigned to a Gullah speaking community on Yamacraw Island off the coast of South Carolina. Contrast that with the English of Voight's co-star Dustin Hoffman in Voight's breakout fllm 'Midnight Cowboy'. After my undergrad in biology, I moved to Chapel Hill with my Japanese girlfriend (exchange student studying linguistics) and studied philosophy (mostly phil. of science and math), while working the night shift at a local convenience store. The customers in Carrboro were about equally divided between mostly yuppie-larvae at Chapel Hill, and working class locals (mostly black). Partly due to upbringing, partly to temperament, I identified more with the locals and became friends with a few. I didn't realize it, but at a subconscious level, I automatically switched to a different register of English when chatting with the locals. I only came to realize it when Yumi, my girlfriend, stopped by and said she could not make heads or tails of what I was saying when chatting with them. But I'm glad I did make friends. The store was robbed at gunpoint a few times when I was not at work, and at least a couple of times, they saved my ass ... uh ... 'skin' from potential violence. At about age 5, I vaguely remember moving from North Carolina and living during a few months of winter with cousins in a little town just outside Chicago, Waukegan Illinois. Some decades later, I returned from my first decade in Japan for a visit to North Carolina ... to which my Chicago cousins had long since moved. My cousin, on hearing my speak, says in a honey thick Southern drawl ... 'Dayam Steve ... You tawk like a yankee.' Hearing that from my 'Northern' cousin, I just about died laughing. I remember when I first came to Japan in the early 1980's, and started my academic career at Temple University Japan ... first as a grad student in linguistics, and then as the biology lab director for about 20 years (while teaching Freshman Writing and Public Speaking) ... when I first got here and met fellow Americans, I could detect a bit of condescension in their voices when they heard my somewhat heavy Southern accent. A side note. Japan is far from the homogenous nation that most outsiders or tourists think it is, and just a hundred kilomenter drive north of Tokyo to Tochigi, or a little further West towards Nagoya, and you will hear distinct accents and even vocabulary changes. And like the U.S., there is some cultural baggage associated with the accents. The Tohoku accent of northern Honshu is associated with 'poor, uneducated, and rural', while the Ryukyu Island accent (Okinawa) is considered by many mainland Japanese (Honshu / Kyusu) as ethnically different and inferior. It was only as recently as the 1990's that a law was passed prohibiting open discrimination against the ethnically distinct Ainu of northern Japan, and just a few years ago ... police brought in from Osaka to quell anti-US military base demonstrations in Okinawa were caught using ethnic slurs against the local Okinawan population. I could go on and on about the discrimination here, including the zainichi (pre-war Korean background) and the burakumin (traditional meat and leather working families at the bottom of the caste system in pre-modern Japan ... but it is universal. Not just Japan. I saw the same thing in Cambodia over the course of four trips to one of the rural areas as a volunteer teacher ... a huge gap in values between the city people and the rural people. Rural Cambodians are a lot like rural people in the U.S. south. They depend on each other more than compete with each other, and they enjoy fried catfish too ... something you don't see much of in Japan. (sigh) Looking at the tribalism juxtaposed with our gadgets, humanity does does not seem to have progressed since the stone age. Our collective cleverness has outstripped our collective wisdom, and we may quickly be approaching our shelf life as a species. Now reading A. Lobaczewski's 'Political Ponerology: The Science of Evil, Psychopathy, and the Origins of the Totalitarian State' - and though he makes a good case for 'skeletons in the family closet' as fractals of the cluster B personality traits that have corrupted most of our institutions and legal processes, I am not as optimistic as he is regarding the potential of a 'science' of evil preventing us from destroying ourselves. We will not be the first species to go extinct, and not the last. Meh. Crows are cool. And belugas. Yeah, I like belugas. 😂 Cheers from Japan, and a Happy New Year to you. steve
I am from Australia and am fascinated by how the Ocracoke Brogue accent has survived on the North Carolina Outer Banks for over 3 centuries. I just hope with the diminishing number of speakers of the Brogue that America has some program to record it before it disappears as what was a remote area becomes part of the mainstream. This is an important part of America’s cultural heritage.
@@no_triggerwarning9953 Hi Trigger. Yeah. I'm afraid that brogue, and other accents will be lost. At one time various accents in the Appalachian mountains had more in common with Shakespearean English than standard American accents, but with the direction funding of academic research is going, I am not optimistic these will be saved for future ears.
The three accents are actually very much “interchangeable” (depending on the social setting). It depends on wether you are sitting on a river bank drinking piss with your mates, or meeting your future mother-in-law. Mind your “P’s” and “Q’s”. It’s ironic that most of the examples given were of actors or politicians😊 Everyone speaks to an audience. Aussie accents themselves are interchangeable (depending on the situation).
When I lived in the US people thought I was British until I cracked into my “Yeah, nah” “Aussie”. I’m not sure where your accent is from but I assume south, maybe Texas? Like The US and the UK there are differences but, probably because of our recent foundation as a nation and the fact that most of us (over 80%) and have done since the advent of radio and television, we didn’t have the time prior to media to form differences as much as you did. As you’ve seen we have an array of accents but with a small population who have lived here predominantly through the 19th and 20th centuries those differences are less pronounced. What is more common (and in my option more exciting) is that urbanisation has meant that more new dialects and accents are emerging with migration. Australia, I believe, could rival America as “the great democratic experiment”.
I'm originally from Brissie (Brisbane) then when I was 13 I moved to Far North Queensland. I'll never forget one time when I was travelling from Brissie to Cairns as a teenager. An American Lady was sitting next to Me and told me I had a strong accent. Mine's definitely a general accent, I'm sure that she may have gone on to hear some broad ones though. There are a lot of farmers and assorted country towns people with that type up here.
Never feel bad about mispronouncing Aussie place names. There are ones that trip everyone non-local up. N.B.: by non-local I don’t mean non-Australian, or even not from that State. More like, from more than 100kms away! For example, there’re two towns in Victoria with names that look like they’re similarly constructed - Wangaratta and Tallangatta - but the syllable breaks are completely different. It’s Wang-a-ratta with a slight stress on the last syllable and Tal-lan-gatta with a stronger stress on the middle syllable. Moe is like the champagne, Moët, and Bairnsdale is a Scottish bairn (child), so it’s more ‘Ben’ than ‘Barn’. Then there’s ones that look difficult but are really just pronounced how they’re spelt, like Bundalaguah or Nhulunbuy.
The first of the las 3 Australian accents just before the TV interview that you recognised, this New South Welch man knows as "Melbourne/Greek Aussie" A.K.A. Australian borne of Greek parents or grandparents from the suburbs around Melbourne like Gelong, Footsgry, St Kilda ect. Though some of Italian decent around the Wollongong aira of NSW sometimes sounds similar
Australians don't think there is enough hours in a day, and we don't want to waste valuable time talking, so we shorten or cut the length of word. The education system in America teaches a different phonetics to what is taught in Australia, which is why Americans would emphasize certain vowels or letters. This is why the spelling of common words are different, e.g. US - Tire, Aus/UK - Tyre. The following was copied with a better explanation: American English is famous for its clear /r/ sounds, whereas British or Australian English lose the /r/ sound if it’s at the end of a word or syllable. For example, the word “smarter” is pronounced /smɑrtər/ in American English, but /smɑːtə/ in British and Australian English.
There's big variation in the "a" sound, as in "cat" or "bad". South Australia uses it rarely, Tasmania uses it quite often. As a Tasmanian I hear South Australians say "dahnce, grahph, chahnce" instead of "dance, graph, chance".
Excellent idea, so many pronunciations vary, depending on the State and first language! Our Prime Minister's always tried to be more English! Cate Blanchett is very adaptable! Struth! Bogans! Crikey! Yes, Eric Bana is a classic, so is Hugh Jackman! Ian Thorpe is more worldly but still very Aussie! If you speak slower and articulate, it's all ok! 👍
Malcolm Fraser is closer to the cultivated accent, Steve Irwin the broad, and the presenter is pretty much the general accent. Everyone else is closer to general rather than broad or cultivated.
Another common accent variation is the ethno-australian accent. Very common in western Sydney, parts of Melbourne and other parts of the country. It's a very distinct accent that you can tell right away. It's usually people who have parents or family from another country who were raised in a community surrounded by ethnic accents, usually Greek, Italian or middle Eastern countries like Lebanon etc. So those inflections from their families accents creep into their Australian accents and form a particular blended accent. You'd be surprised if you heard a thick western Sydney accent. You'd be like "is that an Aussie accent!?"
There's also an Indigenous Australian accent which is more subtle than the ethno-australian accent but still can hear some differences.
I have a general accent.
The "cultivated" accent you will hear more often from people in South Australia where their accent and certain pronounciations are more British/English leaning.
And of course there's some who just like to speak with a posh accent lol.
Some of the broad accents make me cringe. Like Julia Gillard. Even our current PM mumbly and nasally at times...if you're going to be in public office, you don't have to be posh but at least learn how to announciate a bit better.
I wouldn't worry too much about city or place pronunciations, there's plenty of American ones we would get wrong. And Melbourne honestly makes no sense the way we say it. As someone said imagine if the movie "The Bourne Identity" was pronounced the way we say Melbourne 😂🙈
Also sometimes it's a person's accent not a pronounciation thing.
Aussies love to correct Americans if they pronounce Cairns with an American R instead of a soft Aussie R. But I disagree with this. If I went to America I wouldn't pronounce New York with an American R. And highly doubt people would stop me and correct me and make me say it with and American R lol. Sometimes we need to chill a bit and remember it's just that the person saying it, has a different accent.
Another thing which confuses most Americans, is the way Ockers in conversation will say Ye Na (Yes and No ) at the same time to describe something. there was an ad on TV recently with Shaquille O'Neal asking some Aussies about which horse to place a bet on. The answer Ye Na confused him considerably. His response was " is that a yes or no ? ". The ad was for a website called Sports Bet.
Hi Dar, American expat living in Japan for 40 years now (former Associate Prof of Applied Linguistics).
You have a good ear, and I am enjoying reading the comments here too.
Just a few anecdotes and an observation ...
I grew up in rural North Carolina (just outside Greensboro), and had a definite southern drawl. But went to UNC-W to study marine biology, and among my fishing adventures, came across people native to the Outer Banks (not 'snowbirds' with their posh vacation bug-outs), but more like Harker's Island ... and could barely understand them. There was a movie some years ago with, Jon Voight (dad of Angelina Jolie) called 'Conrack', an autobiography about a teacher assigned to a Gullah speaking community on Yamacraw Island off the coast of South Carolina. Contrast that with the English of Voight's co-star Dustin Hoffman in Voight's breakout fllm 'Midnight Cowboy'.
After my undergrad in biology, I moved to Chapel Hill with my Japanese girlfriend (exchange student studying linguistics) and studied philosophy (mostly phil. of science and math), while working the night shift at a local convenience store. The customers in Carrboro were about equally divided between mostly yuppie-larvae at Chapel Hill, and working class locals (mostly black). Partly due to upbringing, partly to temperament, I identified more with the locals and became friends with a few. I didn't realize it, but at a subconscious level, I automatically switched to a different register of English when chatting with the locals. I only came to realize it when Yumi, my girlfriend, stopped by and said she could not make heads or tails of what I was saying when chatting with them. But I'm glad I did make friends. The store was robbed at gunpoint a few times when I was not at work, and at least a couple of times, they saved my ass ... uh ... 'skin' from potential violence.
At about age 5, I vaguely remember moving from North Carolina and living during a few months of winter with cousins in a little town just outside Chicago, Waukegan Illinois. Some decades later, I returned from my first decade in Japan for a visit to North Carolina ... to which my Chicago cousins had long since moved. My cousin, on hearing my speak, says in a honey thick Southern drawl ... 'Dayam Steve ... You tawk like a yankee.' Hearing that from my 'Northern' cousin, I just about died laughing.
I remember when I first came to Japan in the early 1980's, and started my academic career at Temple University Japan ... first as a grad student in linguistics, and then as the biology lab director for about 20 years (while teaching Freshman Writing and Public Speaking) ... when I first got here and met fellow Americans, I could detect a bit of condescension in their voices when they heard my somewhat heavy Southern accent.
A side note. Japan is far from the homogenous nation that most outsiders or tourists think it is, and just a hundred kilomenter drive north of Tokyo to Tochigi, or a little further West towards Nagoya, and you will hear distinct accents and even vocabulary changes. And like the U.S., there is some cultural baggage associated with the accents. The Tohoku accent of northern Honshu is associated with 'poor, uneducated, and rural', while the Ryukyu Island accent (Okinawa) is considered by many mainland Japanese (Honshu / Kyusu) as ethnically different and inferior. It was only as recently as the 1990's that a law was passed prohibiting open discrimination against the ethnically distinct Ainu of northern Japan, and just a few years ago ... police brought in from Osaka to quell anti-US military base demonstrations in Okinawa were caught using ethnic slurs against the local Okinawan population. I could go on and on about the discrimination here, including the zainichi (pre-war Korean background) and the burakumin (traditional meat and leather working families at the bottom of the caste system in pre-modern Japan ... but it is universal. Not just Japan. I saw the same thing in Cambodia over the course of four trips to one of the rural areas as a volunteer teacher ... a huge gap in values between the city people and the rural people. Rural Cambodians are a lot like rural people in the U.S. south. They depend on each other more than compete with each other, and they enjoy fried catfish too ... something you don't see much of in Japan.
(sigh) Looking at the tribalism juxtaposed with our gadgets, humanity does does not seem to have progressed since the stone age. Our collective cleverness has outstripped our collective wisdom, and we may quickly be approaching our shelf life as a species. Now reading A. Lobaczewski's 'Political Ponerology: The Science of Evil, Psychopathy, and the Origins of the Totalitarian State' - and though he makes a good case for 'skeletons in the family closet' as fractals of the cluster B personality traits that have corrupted most of our institutions and legal processes, I am not as optimistic as he is regarding the potential of a 'science' of evil preventing us from destroying ourselves. We will not be the first species to go extinct, and not the last. Meh. Crows are cool. And belugas. Yeah, I like belugas. 😂
Cheers from Japan, and a Happy New Year to you.
steve
I am from Australia and am fascinated by how the Ocracoke Brogue accent has survived on the North Carolina Outer Banks for over 3 centuries. I just hope with the diminishing number of speakers of the Brogue that America has some program to record it before it disappears as what was a remote area becomes part of the mainstream. This is an important part of America’s cultural heritage.
@@no_triggerwarning9953 Hi Trigger. Yeah. I'm afraid that brogue, and other accents will be lost. At one time various accents in the Appalachian mountains had more in common with Shakespearean English than standard American accents, but with the direction funding of academic research is going, I am not optimistic these will be saved for future ears.
The three accents are actually very much “interchangeable” (depending on the social setting). It depends on wether you are sitting on a river bank drinking piss with your mates, or meeting your future mother-in-law. Mind your “P’s” and “Q’s”.
It’s ironic that most of the examples given were of actors or politicians😊
Everyone speaks to an audience. Aussie accents themselves are interchangeable (depending on the situation).
When I lived in the US people thought I was British until I cracked into my “Yeah, nah” “Aussie”.
I’m not sure where your accent is from but I assume south, maybe Texas?
Like The US and the UK there are differences but, probably because of our recent foundation as a nation and the fact that most of us (over 80%) and have done since the advent of radio and television, we didn’t have the time prior to media to form differences as much as you did.
As you’ve seen we have an array of accents but with a small population who have lived here predominantly through the 19th and 20th centuries those differences are less pronounced.
What is more common (and in my option more exciting) is that urbanisation has meant that more new dialects and accents are emerging with migration.
Australia, I believe, could rival America as “the great democratic experiment”.
You're doing well, Dar. :D
I'm originally from Brissie (Brisbane) then when I was 13 I moved to Far North Queensland. I'll never forget one time when I was travelling from Brissie to Cairns as a teenager. An American Lady was sitting next to Me and told me I had a strong accent. Mine's definitely a general accent, I'm sure that she may have gone on to hear some broad ones though. There are a lot of farmers and assorted country towns people with that type up here.
Eric banner was in TROY
Sounding half Aussie already. 😂
Never feel bad about mispronouncing Aussie place names. There are ones that trip everyone non-local up. N.B.: by non-local I don’t mean non-Australian, or even not from that State. More like, from more than 100kms away!
For example, there’re two towns in Victoria with names that look like they’re similarly constructed - Wangaratta and Tallangatta - but the syllable breaks are completely different. It’s Wang-a-ratta with a slight stress on the last syllable and Tal-lan-gatta with a stronger stress on the middle syllable. Moe is like the champagne, Moët, and Bairnsdale is a Scottish bairn (child), so it’s more ‘Ben’ than ‘Barn’. Then there’s ones that look difficult but are really just pronounced how they’re spelt, like Bundalaguah or Nhulunbuy.
The first of the las 3 Australian accents just before the TV interview that you recognised, this New South Welch man knows as "Melbourne/Greek Aussie"
A.K.A. Australian borne of Greek parents or grandparents from the suburbs around Melbourne like Gelong, Footsgry, St Kilda ect.
Though some of Italian decent around the Wollongong aira of NSW sometimes sounds similar
Con the fruiterer rang in my head reading that lol
My accent is classed as aussie bogan lmao
Struth mate, it's ok not sayin things about Aust real good, i can't say american place names good either, and i'm happy about that.
Australians don't think there is enough hours in a day, and we don't want to waste valuable time talking, so we shorten or cut the length of word. The education system in America teaches a different phonetics to what is taught in Australia, which is why Americans would emphasize certain vowels or letters. This is why the spelling of common words are different, e.g. US - Tire, Aus/UK - Tyre.
The following was copied with a better explanation:
American English is famous for its clear /r/ sounds, whereas British or Australian English lose the /r/ sound if it’s at the end of a word or syllable. For example, the word “smarter” is pronounced /smɑrtər/ in American English, but /smɑːtə/ in British and Australian English.
Fairy nuff it seems I've got a broad accent without even really knowing it.
I don't know how many times I have to say it but Australians don't have an accent everyone else does .
Basically each state has an accent too …
QLD and south Australia speak really slow
Victoria speak fast
It’s hard to explain
There's big variation in the "a" sound, as in "cat" or "bad". South Australia uses it rarely, Tasmania uses it quite often. As a Tasmanian I hear South Australians say "dahnce, grahph, chahnce" instead of "dance, graph, chance".
City people all try to speak as posh as the old British accent that was used on TV until the mid 80s
Canberra = can-bra
You know Mel-bin and bris-bin
Geelong = ja-long
Aussie = oz-z/ ozy
Yeah nah = no thanks
Nah yeah = yes please
Australia...
Cultivated = os-trail-E-ah
Common = os-trail-ya
Broad = ah-stray-ya
Excellent idea, so many pronunciations vary, depending on the State and first language! Our Prime Minister's always tried to be more English! Cate Blanchett is very adaptable! Struth! Bogans! Crikey! Yes, Eric Bana is a classic, so is Hugh Jackman! Ian Thorpe is more worldly but still very Aussie! If you speak slower and articulate, it's all ok! 👍
Our current PM doesn’t try to be cultivated lol
@@lillibitjohnson7293 You mean that person who can barely speak, so embarassing!? 🙁🤭
@@jenniferharrison8915 alrighty then, I see you preferred that last lot of corrupt arseholes
@@jenniferharrison8915 funny that you were taking the piss out of PMs for pretending to be more English a minute ago lol
@@jenniferharrison8915 also Hawke never pretended , that seems to be the wannabe conservative twats who bung it on
Malcolm Fraser is closer to the cultivated accent, Steve Irwin the broad, and the presenter is pretty much the general accent. Everyone else is closer to general rather than broad or cultivated.