Australian English accents
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- Опубликовано: 1 окт 2024
- A fun but detailed look at Australian English accents focussing on General Australian. I look at the history of English in Australia compare Australian accents to pronunciation in other parts of the English-speaking world.
For a more detailed look at the GOAT vowel, check out this excellent video by @DrGeoffLindsey • My favourite vowel: Oh...
The Australian modern accent is so different to even how we spoke 60 years ago. If you watch old street interviews you’ll see
I'm a huge fan of the old aussie accent. It has a little more dignity to it, tho maybe that's coz I always hear it in old interviews with celebs and prime ministers etc.
I remember as a young kid in the 80's hearing Aussie slang like ' Pigs Arse ' and ' Blow me down '....haven't heard those words for about 30yrs
Don't rely overly on those old recordings - accents have absolutely evolved, but some of the difference is down to biases in the technology itself, and people knowing that and deliberately trying to speak to be understood. Dunno if you're old enough to know what a "phone voice" is...? Most people's "phone voice" at least used to sound utterly plummy, 'cause we knew that was what was needed for someone else to clearly understand. Same with radio accents - whether in Australia, the UK, the US, or anywhere else, noone really spoke with those old radio presenter accents.
pigs arse ya haven’t heard someone say that since the 80s
I remember noticing when I was young that very elderly working class Australians (people who grew up in the 19th century) sometimes had surprisingly cultivated accents and not the “broad” accent you might expect. I suspect they might now be perceived as speaking “posh”.
It's so rare to hear a non-Aussie pull off our accent for even snippets at a time. So to nail it so consistently for so long... well, colour me impressed (and oddly flattered)! Nice one, mate
Wow. Thank you. So glad to hear the that.
@@DaveHuxtableLanguages It was amazing! I am an English as a second language in Australia, and aside from one or 2 words, I would have guessed you were Aussie. Well done!
As a native Aussie I agree, it's a pretty consistently good one. I knew he was English so I kept listening out for slips.
Wait, he's not occa? That's actually wild af! I've never ever ever heard aussie accents getting nailed. Here the accent and tonality matches the approximate age. That's craaaazy
Holy moly. I'm Australian and didn't realise he wasn't Aussie 😂. Thought he was excellent at doing English accents though lol.
Your range and consistency with accents without becoming extreme with them is a thing to behold. Thank you Dave. I wonder how long this video took you to record!
The late Mark McManus of Taggart strayed out on Skippy. Someone asked him how they kept Skippy so small. Skippy sometimes falls out of a tree. But kangaroos don’t climb trees. Skippy does …
An Aussie here. I would absolutely believe you to be a fellow Australian. It's quite rare to hear a non-Australian mimic the accent so perfectly. Americans do an almost-believable, late 1800s Cockney Londoner when trying to do our accent. Subscribed.
To be fair they also do that when they try to sound English
Amazing. As an Australian, I have often listened to people demonstrating their ability to mimic accents and have been impressed until they attempt an Australian accent. At that point, I normally lose faith in their ability for all the previous accents. Not with this guy. This was the first time I had seen one of his videos and, at first, I thought he was Australian. I spent the rest of the video waiting for him to slip up but anything I might have questioned I would not have spotted if I was talking to him over the fence.
As an older Australian, I feel I can draw upon some older slang - "That was a ripper, Davo!"
Literally thought old mate was Australian until he said "fellow Americans" at the end, holy shit
I am extremely impressed at how well you pulled off an Aussie accent honestly, I have literally never heard a non-Aussie do it so well
As a kiwi who’s lived here in Queensland for 7 years, I was shocked to go to his channel and find out he wasn’t actually Australian hahaha
Kate Winslet😉
It's not just class differences, there's definitely a some more regionality to it. I was in Melbourne a few weeks ago, and there's definitely a vowel shift in their short e. They pronounce it "Malbn" to my ear, rather than my regional South Aussie "Melbn". And you can pick a Queenslander out of a lineup any day of the week, because they always wear their toggs when they go to the pewl to cewl off after schewl.
Queenslanders drag their vowels. Although with migration from the south it is already changing.
Yea. I've got that Melbourne accent. Like Ned Kally vs Ned Kelly. Allan vs Ellen.
I feel the ‘Victorian’ accent is really distinctive to my Qld ear, there is a shift from ‘e’ to ‘a’ (like someone described above, e.g. Kelly to Kally) that really stands out, often on tv and radio. There also used to be an ad for Bendigo Bank on when we were kids that we’d always imitate when it came on: instead of “so nice to have someone speak to us face to face” they’d say “…fice to fice”.
Edit to add - I grew up in country Qld and very used to hearing broad Australian up here so I don’t think it is solely attributable to class distinction.
@@crimsoncobber broad Aussie definitely isn't a class thing, and relates more to rural and northern speech. It's distinct from ocker/bogan.
I’m from Malban an I love the AY UF AL (AFL)
Your accent was so consistent and convincing we would call you Davo without a second thought :P
Ikr?!
Dave, O M G.
I am an Australian and have legitimately never ever EVER heard someone who fooled me with an Australian accent like this video has.
A lot of linguistic youtubers have perfect pronunciations of the way we say words, but as soon as it comes to sustaining the accent, it always goes out the window and is never passable. UNTIL I SAW THIS!
As a FURTHER testament, I sent your french video to my french relatives and they didnt believe me when I said you weren't french either.
Sir, you are a truly an accent and language master. This is absolutely flawless.
Hi Hannah
Your mimic of our accent is by and far the best I've ever heard, insanely impressive.
I'm Aussie, and I reckon your accent is close to perfect. Can I say the two place I thought it slipped? (and I might be wrong, I'm from Melbourne and I realise this will vary across the country). The opening "g'day" could have slightly more of the "y" sound. The other thing is the word "edges", which I would say with more of a schwa as the second E and less of an "i". But you sound more Aussie than I do, because, living in Europe I lost the tendency to call 12 months a "yiya" and pronounce it more RP now.
Hi. That's good to hear and thanks for pointing out where there's room for improvement. Others have mentioned g'day, so maybe I wasn't totally in the groove yet. Sad to hear you've lost your yiya.
I flatted with a Welsh person in London and it took a while to work out that a yerr was a year!@@DaveHuxtableLanguages
I thought the pronunciation of the word "ports" was also just a little bit off, also seemed to get the bath/dance stuff a bit confused
Also the way he pronounced “schwa” :)
omg, yiya, i'm never going to not hiya that evə again
We definitely do have regional differences in Australia, although they are not as distinguished as much compared to the US and UK. But we do have some regional/geographic differences, especially in the way we pronounce certain vowels and diphthongs.
For example, in most of the country people pronounce the name for "Melbourne" as [ˈmɛɫbn̩] yet we pronounce it as [ˈmæ͡ʊˡbøn] or [ˈmæ͡ʊˡbən] here in Southern Victoria and parts of Tasmania. (as a result of the /ɛ/ moving down to [æ] before glides, /ɪ̝/ moves down to [ɛ], ergo getting /mɪ̝ɫk/ → [mɛ͡ʊˡk])
Another difference would be in the long a vowel, we truly have 3 different ways of pronouncing it. In Western Australia and South Australia (typically Adelaide) it is pronounced identical to the stereotypical Southern British [ɑː], in Queensland and New South Wales it is pronounced as [ɐː] and everywhere else it is pronounced as [aː].
As you can see, we do have some regional distinctions in the Australian accents.
Yes... I agree!
Your Australian accent is extremely good, not overdone like most people would do. The pacing of your sentences reminds me of the guy who does the finance report on the ABC news. I wouldn't say that the Australian and NZ accents are very similar, for Aussies and Kiwis they're like chalk and cheese.
And Australia is pronounced Stray-ya, lol, afterall we speak Strine!
depends on the New Zealander. i play games with some guys from New Zealand and their accent is pretty different from what you would expect from say an older generation kiwi. you can tell the difference if you listen but it doesnt jump out at me instantly like i would expect.
Alan Kohler (Alun Cola)
@@saxongreen78 Yes, that's him. I like his wit.
@@liam3104 in a weird coincidence, my name is also liam, and i also have a kiwi friend with a much different accent... they sound more english than anything, with no hints of any kiwi pronunciation
The common joke amongst Aussies is that New Zealander’s say fush and chups. Whilst this is relatively true for most JAFA’s, when i was working in the South Island, i noticed they had eliminated the vowels all together. They were pronouncing it as fsh and chps, with no discernible vowel sounds whatsoever.
There are some interesting distinct accents across the country. I’m from NSW and in western Sydney they have a very unique accent due to lots of cultural mixing. The more you head out west, it’s far ?thicker as an accent. Also, some indigenous Australians have a different way of speaking and some novel slang.
Even Aboriginal English varies a lot. Koori language is different from how it's spoken up north, for example.
People almost never talk about the Sydney accent when discussing Australian accents but it's extremely apparent when you hear someone from there. Anecdotally to me it seems to come from Mediterranean accents like Italian and Greek
Agree! Western Sydney has its own accent. Mostly influenced by Arabic and Greek.
@@dbenedict3555 people confuse Western Sydney and broad Australian accents. Broad Aussie is a lot more Irish and Scots.
@@dbenedict3555and Lebo
Just a minor correction, the First Fleet arrived in Australia in 1788. It left the UK in May 1787 but took 250 odd days to get to Australia which is possibly where the confusion arose.
Split Enz: 6 months in a leaky boat. 🎶🎵🎶🎼
I saw that too, and thought he wa a year early; but the new accent would have started almost straight away on the ships, not waiting for landfall. Most of the sailing happened in 1787, so … he's quite correct.
@@mrewan6221No. he says “Of the 1,373 people who landed in Sydney cove in 1787 as part of the first fleet...”
The First Fleet arrived in Sydney cove on 25 January 1788. That’s why Australia Day is on that date and why Australia’s bicentenary was in 1988. Guessing he had 1787 in his head from the previous slide and just misspoke. Not a huge deal.
He also said that people have only been speaking English in Australia since 1787, benefit of the doubt, he may have meant explorers, shipwreck survivors or others operating near Australia then but the first permanent, English speaking settlement was founded in 1788
@@D4N1CU5 If he said "… landed in Sydney Cove in 1787 …" then yes, he got it wrong. (I'm prepared to believe what you wrote; don't wan't to have to search through.) I don't think he _was_ talking about transient Europeans.
Other things to consider (and I'm doing this from memory, so could be wrong):
• Didn't the First Fleet arrive in Botany Bay a little earlier? I'm thinking about 19th Jan 1788. (Still not 1787, though.)
• When was Sydney Cove named that? I think it might just have been part of Port Jackson at the time …. and who named Port Jackson? Was it Cook, or later?
• Wasn't Dampier long before both Cook and the First Fleet? I think that was the first English-speaking exploration. Jansz was about 1606.
• Australia Day is on the 26th, and the reason for that date is quite flimsy. There was probably some sort of proclamation. Other dates have a claim just as good. (And that's keeping the matter simply about European settlement, and ignoring the elephant in the room.) I've long referred to it as New South Wales Day, and it has very little relationship to the other (now) states or the Commonwealth.
@@D4N1CU5Australia Day is 26th Jan. But yeah, you're correct re 1788.
It's not just the time difference with South Australia, but also who the immigrants were. SA wasn't a penal colony, but rather dominated by the mining industry. Thousands of Cornish miners were brought in. Has anyone done a study on the Cornish influence on South Australian English? (I'm descended from a Cornish mining family; our branch came to West Virginia, another branch went to South Australia.)
That would be fascinating. A topic for a research trip.
South Australia is interesting in many ways. It also had strong German migration in the 1950s, mainly dairy farmers who established Rudolf Steiner style organic farming. That's why you see towns like Hahndorf and Germantown in the cycling tour down under that's in SA. Actually this created something weird; German settlers in Barossa Valley in South Australia kept using German as it was in the 1950s and never changed. Thus you take a current German person and they meet a Barossa Valley German migrant: they barely understand each other.
That's like the German spoken in various parts of the USA like Pennsylvania and Texas. @@musicalneptunian
@@musicalneptunian do you mean the 1850s? in our german class we did an assignment on the lutherans that came out to SA in the 1840-50s. i'm sure there would have been more recent immigrants as well but the towns that you mentioned are old german lutheran towns.
Add to that the major influx of German immigrants like my own family that settled there in 1836
Incredible Dave. Spot on with the accent.
One thing to add - in Melbourne we have dropped “el” for “al”, so “Halp”, “Malbn” and “Halicopter”. It’s an easy way to tell the difference between a Melburnian and the rest of the east coast
Thank you. I’ll have to listen out for that.
but they don't know this in Malbn, in Hobart it is obvious, think it's only in the name of the city though
@@meikala2114 What's obvious in Hobart? I come from there and i don't know what you are suggesting.
This is true. I'm from Northern Victoria and there is no difference between the first vowel sound in Alice or Ellis. The way the 'e' Melbourne is pronounced is less like an 'a' and more like a very short version of the 'ei' sound in veil. @@DaveHuxtableLanguages
Sorry, no one else in Australia pronounces Melbourne "Meel-borne" though. It's rather pretentious local thing and driven by class snobbery (certain suburbs etc) in my experience. The fact is (listen when you travel next time) in normal unaffected speech for 99.9% of Australians the word Malbourne and Melbourne are pronounced identically. Gerard Whately the sport commentator is a good example of this funny "Meelbourne" pronunciation. Of course 100% agree that for locals it is always Melbun never Melborn (American style).
As someone from Perth, I think there is a subtle but distinct variation between west and east in Australian accents - I can tell fairly quickly when someone is from the eastern states (think of "pool" in WA vs "poo-wel" over east). I think the accent in WA, not counting regional areas, is generally a lot milder of an Australian accent than over east, and a lot closer to a British accent. Maybe this is due to the higher percentage of immigrants from England in WA?
That’s fascinating. I think often, local people can hear subtle distinctions that others don’t notice.
Brits maintain their local accents in WA. THhey degenerate into some odd Generic expat English elsewhere,
Totally agree. I grew up in Perth and then when I moved to the eastern states (Brisbane and Sydney) got asked sometimes if I was from the UK😅
Yes, from Perth here, definitely more mild here for sure. Got mistaken for British as well!!
I'm from Adelaide. I always hated how foreigners (mainly Americans) would try to imitate the Aussie accent. I always thought, "we sound nothing like like that." Then I stayed in Sydney for some time, and those attempts at an Aussie accent made so much more sense.
I also find it pretty easy to spot a Victorian, but they're the ones I've had the greatest exposure to.
Interesting video, you could probably make a much longer video about our accent and still not cover many of the nuances. One influence you didn’t touch on was the teaching of English in schools that prevented the Aussie accent from becoming more widespread earlier. Early recordings of Australians typically had a much stronger Queens English influence and I think it was largely when they allowed Australian pronunciation to be taught in schools that it really flourished. I’d guess that private schools of the time might have kept teaching proper English which has influenced the more refined sounding Aussie accent.
Apart from the Indigenous accent most accents here feel like they could be plotted on a scale where the broad, ocker accent found more frequently in the country, is most Australian and the more refined, city accent is “less Australian” (in a sense). There are many variations based on culture but the main accent that I would suggest is “class” based, is the bogan accent. Check out the most Australian man interviewed for a classic bogan and you can see the reaction of the tv presenters talking to him via video link.
Neel Kolhatkar’s old youtube accent videos are quite eye opening in his nuanced examples of the many variations of accent by culture, age and gender. Or watch old Aussie tv shows like Wog’s out of work or Acropolis Now for great examples of greek Australian accents - maybe avoid Mark Mitchel’s ‘Con The Fruiterer’ skits from the Comedy Company. Nick Kyrgios has a subtle greek influence being half Greek… Melbourne has the largest population of Greeks outside Athens so Aussies with Greek heritage have influenced the Melbournian accent more specifically. Im from Brisbane and Queenslanders tend more towards a Steve Irwin broad accent although rarely so extreme.
For the most part, “Class” is much harder to define in australia. While some accents might sound higher or lower class I don’t think it’s quite so clear. I personally shift my accent depending on who Im talking to and I expect many people do so you might pick one persons accent as being more refined then hear them in another context and they sound much more broad. Cultural cringe used to be spoken of much more, especially when an Aussie was over seas and people thought they were turning up their accent to sound more Aussie.
Thanks so much for your very informative comment.
Yes, no longer heard, but Con the Fruiterer’s accent was exactly the accent of railway announcements and milk bars (and fruit and veg shops) in late 60s to late 70s Australia, but out of currency by the time the Comedy Company came out. Those southern European migrants who ‘took over’ all those small businesses during this time, or worked in the ‘ordinary’ jobs other Aussies were happy to step out of, and didn’t let ‘Australian as a Second Language’ get in the way of getting on, made Straya an even better and more interesting place than it already was.
I moved from the country to Newtown in Sydney to go to Uni in 1973. Was gobsmacked to see that so many of the shop signs in King St Newtown were in Greek (seemed like 75%).
As a typical student of the day, I worked in a pub as a Bar Useful picking up glasses. A fellow Bar Useful was a retired Greek bloke who was one of the wave of migrants who came to Oz in the 50s. He’d owned a milk bar, worked hard to make a good living, raised his family and set them on their roads to life, sold the milk bar (to a family of more recently arrived Greeks) and retired. He took up Bar Usefulling because he wanted to keep active and it gave him a way to maintain contact with all the people in the area who had frequented his milk bar (probably for real hamburgers and cigarettes mainly, 60s!), many of whom who were also the regulars at the local pub. Now he had been in Oz for more than 25 years by then, using English daily, but Con the Fruiterer was an exemplar of diction and purity of speech in comparison. I was always having to ask him to repeat himself, or guess at what he was saying. His grammar was fine, but getting his tongue around the sound of words of Aussie English was like a, um, er, foreign language to him. His English pronunciation was so exaggerated in an Aussie way, that it sounded neither English nor Australian.
Since coming to Oz, he had never been back to Greece, so now retired, he went back home for a visit. He was telling me about his trip, including how he had spoken no English during this time and of how the Greek language had idiomatically changed over the years (with its equivalents of ‘hey man’ ‘far out’ , 'dig it', ‘cool’ etc, that were then the vogue in the English speaking world, and that he was considered old-fashioned in how he spoke Greek). He finished with an anecdote about the journey back to Oz. His flight back involved a stop-over in Rome. He said that he was in the queue at Rome airport when, among the hubbub he detected an Aussie accent, and he said he was so excited at hearing it, he rushed over, and in what would have been full impenetrable Con the Fruiterer Plus, excitedly greeted these total strangers with “Ah Australian accent, bee-you-deful, I love it,” and telling them how wonderful it was to hear the native tones of his adopted country again. It turned out they were (mainly) a group of Aussies born to Italian migrants who were coming home from their own exploration of their roots, and after being initially startled by this mad Greek, worked out what was going on and nobody ended up being arrested for assault.
Love our melting pot.
@@thickquinkly1560loved him
6th generation South Australian of free settlers from the UK here…. I can definitely tell the differences in pronunciation from work colleagues who are from Victoria- branch, school, pool, dance, graph etc - when I first went to Sydney for a holiday at 18 locals thought I was from New Zealand!
I'm Victorian but lived in Adelaide when I was little, some pronunciation has stuck so people look at me funny with dance, castle etc..
@@BB-xx3dvI think The Downers have their own special upper class Adelaide accent all to themselves! 😅
So true, from a 5th gen Sth Aussie.
Dave, your Australian accent is uncanny, flawless even. Neither 'ocker', nor 'drongo-uncouth', nor overly nasal, nor overly refined either. Just about the best all-round imitation I've heard, and quite frankly even better than a lot of Australian actors who themselves overdo the ocker-drawl oftentimes. Well done sir!
Wow - I’m honoured.
I totally agree, I have lived in Australia for many years and I've never heard a so balanced accent like this before. You're a champ that's for sure 🎉
@@MannyRockingham Wow. Thank you.
SOooooo looking forward to this episode. As a North-Queenslander I always loved the uniqueness of the "Aussie" accent AND it's origins in UK (and later US) cultural influences. This breakdown is awesome so thanks for that. As other Aussie viewers have and will comment though, I used to tell tourists that one of the main differences were country and city (perhaps what you describe as broad and cultured) - those raised in the outback or far north have such a lovely 'twang' and use 'ay?" regularly in conversation to end sentences. I've lost that having moved from the country and now have been living in the city for 30 years but travelling home to family the twang returns. Love this episode - thanks so much
My pleasure. So glad you enjoyed it.
I’m glad you included the “tip” for Americans about the “Aussie” nick name. You nailed it with the “Mike Jagger” analogy. 😉👍🏻
Who would mistake Mick for Mike though? They are spelled differently.
There definitely are geographical differences in Australian accents. I never noticed it as a teenager but, when I travelled the world in the 80s for months and met other Australian tourists, I realised how different our accents were and I could unfailingly tell people from Sydney, Melbourne (my home town) and Adelaide, in particular. All the polyglots such as yourself nearly always use Sydney accents as examples, even when you say there are no geographical differences.
Yeah it's strange that this is a blind spot for him when he's usually so accurate. I live in Brisbane and I can readily tell locals from Sydneysiders and of course you can tell which side of Sydney a person is from.
It’s ok guys he lumped all londoners as cockney too. Having lived here for 40 years there are at least 4 distinct accents in london between those who speak English as a first language. I can even tell the difference between the smaller suburban towns (at least in the west where I’m from). You guys gets to hear the subtleties on a daily basis. But to the rest of us you all sound nearly the same.
@@MrDanmjack Maybe we all sound the same because nearly all Australians on TV or in movies are from Sydney 🙂
@@normandiebryant6989more like all the most successful went to NIDA .... in Sydney.
eeeeeh
He does say it's *more* homogenous, but he also points out regional differences in Aussie English, for example the trap/bath split. Not sure he attempts to convince anyone that the entire country has exactly one accent
This is the first video of yours I've seen, and it took me until 3:50 to suspect that I wasn't listening to a native Australian speaker. As an Australian myself, I'm amazed at how brilliant your Australian accent is. Well done!
Me too! It took me even longer before I started doubting myself weather he was Aussie or not…😮
Yep! I thiiink the only slip was
Rough·edges was spoken as rough·ed·ges? Maybe?
Yeah I thought it was brave of an Aussie to attempt a Brummy accent!
It’s really very good, but ‘edg-is’ was a subtle giveaway. There were a few other places where I felt the accent was a little exaggerated but could have just been a regional difference.
I thought it was the 'that' , its a bit more forward/clearer/wider than how we would say it. Me at least.
Something that I loved is that you didn’t say that we *don’t* have regional variations, just that we have larger sociocultural variations than regional variations. Many youtubers have said that we don’t have regional variations at all which is simply not true. I can tell very quickly whether or not someone is from the eastern states as opposed to western australia or south australia but it would probably be a lot harder for people out of australia to tell these differences. Even within the eastern states there is more variation. It seems like your general australian accent is closer to a sydney accent, a melbourne accent differs in a few places but most noticeably is that they tend to replace the e in melbourne and similar with something closer to the trap vowel or something like this: /'mælbən/
You did quite a good job of speaking in a general Aussie accent. Most Brits and Americans make us sound like Cockneys when they try to imitate us, which is just WRONG 😅 We do have some regional differences; you can often tell if someone's from Adelaide, for example, because they have an odd British inflection in some of their vowels & consonants. Also, it's important to remember that we're a multicultural nation. Immigrants, and some ppl born here of a non-English speaking background, have a huge range of accents.
Brits definitely don't think Aussies sound like Cockneys. The nasal twang and upward inflexion at the end of sentences isn't a Bitish thing, although, with American influence, the latter is slowly becoming normalised by younger people.
@@BillDavies-ej6ye We don't all do the upward inflection. It tends to be younger ppl, especially women. And you may not think we sound like Cockneys, but that's how you make us sound when you try to imitate us 😅
Slowed down Cockney but every sentence rises in pitch at the end like it is a question?
@@KindredBrujah no, that's an exaggeration.
Aussie soaps were popular in UK when I was young, and it was tangentially amusing to hear the schism in accents between the characters who were 'working class', of the 'monied/professional classes' who spoke with something closer to RP (although very much still Antipodean) and those in between - think "Queen" Bea Smith vs Vera Benett vs Erica Davidson in _Prisoner: Cell Block H._
You were clearly an even bigger fan than I was. Yes, cell block H was
A good one.
Excellent. For more up to date cultural references I would recommend listening to bogan street talk (eg the show Housos) and the Melbourne tones of "Kath and Kim" (especially in the snobby voices of characters Trude and Prue). Love your videos mate!
Thanks for the tips!
I almost forgot you weren’t Aussie for a second there 😂
That’s good to hear.
Wow, as an Aussie I don't know how to feel about not realising that you're not actually Australian and were putting on our accent so well. You fooled me! There were only a couple of times you sounded a little off and I just chalked it up to you being from SA or Tassie where they all sound a little weird.
Thanks for your interesting video, David. However, why do you cite 1787 as year in which "people have been speaking English in Australia"? The First Fleet arrived in Botany Bay between 18th & 20th January 1788, moving to Sydney Cove on 26 January after Botany Bay had been found to be unsuitable for settlement. Am happy to be corrected if there is now other evidence of which I am unaware.
That aside, I appreciate all the hard work & scholarship behind your video. Well done!
Thanks for that Dave, interesting to hear how the accent came about. It is interesting how accents and languages change. Our family moved from England out to New Zealand in the mid-seventies when the Kiwi accent was quite broad, (a local comedian had a character called "Lynn of Tawa", she epitomised this ruclips.net/video/qT7mupw8QXY/видео.html) Ozzies used to give the Kiwi's a hard time about "F 'u' sh 'n Ch 'u' ps and how the end of a sentence had a raised tone or the word 'A', so it sounded like every sentence was finished with a question. But since then I've noticed a lot of the exagerated parts have diminished in the Kiwi accent but interestingly the "general accent" of Ozzies has adopted the raising of tones at the end of sentences.
Glad you enjoyed it. Yes, it’s sad how accents are becoming more alike.
I sometimes cringe when I hear my own accent in a recording - I've always wanted to sound a little more cultivated. But then I travel o/s and hear another Australian somewhere close by and my heart skips 🥰
I loved the video now let me sledge you.
7:34 Oops. Wrong dance.
And I think Adelaide can also be explained by the sheer volume of krauts there, who would easily go from Tanz to Dance and keep the vowel sound.
11:20 Oops no thumbnail.
Dave I absolutely love your channel. Very informative and fun with a smattering of funny
Great. Thanks for letting me know.
Ever heard the *old* Essex accent? Not the modern one which is from Londoners that have moved out, but the really old Essex accent. It is pure Australian.
Not really though I grew up in Essex. I’ll have to check out the BBC accent archives.
I have a similar story for West Sussex, though the only similar accent I know of is the high cracking voice people used to adopt, years ago, as an impression of 16th century or earlier English.
As an aussie who lived and worked in the USA (Southern New Hampshire and Boston) for several years, it would amuse me that Murricans thought that we talked "strange". I once had someone in MA, apologize that she couldn't understand me "I can't understand your New Jersey accent" - I found fairly quickly, that I could pick out NY, Boston, Maine Philly and several other accents fairly quickly.
Yes! I have noticed similarities between the Aussie accent and Americans accents from New Jersey or Queens. We both pronounce words like "Here" with a dipthong said: "Hee-ya" into two syllables.
That’s 1788?
Hi Dave, Australian here. You surely got the last vowel in “hamster” right at 2:02, but I’m afraid the first vowel didn’t sound Australian to me due to the lack of BAD/LAD split, in which stressed /æ/ becomes lengthened before voiced stops and nasals in certain words. Before nasals, this vowel is often raised, but this varies by speaker. I would’ve said [hɛ̃ːmstɐ]
Thanks for shining a light on Australian English!
Pretty niche, but I wonder if you'll ever take a stab at South African English accents? Not only are they pretty unfamiliar to many people, but people confuse them with the variety of people who speak English as a second language here - particularly white Afrikaners. Our accent has some characteristics in common with Kiwi English, and we also have more distinct class differences than regional differences - although these exist too with the most pronounced difference being English speakers from Kwazulu-Natal province.
Because of the unfamiliarity, our accent _and_ Afrikaners speaking English are pretty much never done really well in films. Leo made a good but failed attempt in Blood Diamond and Matt Damon did okay but not great in Invictus. Of course when it comes to speakers of other languages in SA speaking English there's huge variety. There's also a fairly large population of self-described Coloured people who speak English as their home language - with a dramatically different accent with radically different influences.
I lived in London for a few years and the only English accent that I recognised Australian in, was the East London accent…. Found a book when I was there “The Lonely Planet Guide to Australian”… It reckoned the Aussie accent had already started to form with the first generation of kids… Great vid old mate, cheers
Again, very interesting. English language is truly baffling..love the little history lesson too. I hope to become fluent in English one day
P.S. I didn't know kangaroos do or don't make that noise..what do kangaroos say? Is duck accents next? What even was this? It was Huxtable™.
Some do make that kind of sound... but they can just as well say "RHAAWHR!" or "Eeeehhhhhh!". Marsupials in general can typically make a wealth of different noises, ranging from clicks and whispers to blood curdling growls and screams.
I find it quite touching that a wallaby (approximately 1 foot tall) caught in a fence will try to make "you don't want to mess with me!" growls when a person approaches, with the same tone of voice as a small boy trying to ward off bullies. Amazing how much all mammals have in common, despite what we often thing of as vast differences in size and shape.
There are very subtle but noticeable differences in Aus accents from different regions and states. South Aussie for one is easy to pick straight away. eg They tend to say "gehl" in place of "girl", and they give more weight to vowels in words like "shower" whereas in NSW they are more likely to say "shour".
I think Victorians have one of the most divergent Australian accents. With words like Mal-bin instead of Mel-bin or Melbourne, Al-efahnt instead of Eli-phint or elephant. Its got a touch of that drawly Californian sound.
As an Australian, I have to tell you that there are many distinctive regional Australian dialects, along with many differences between groups with different cultural backgrounds and between people of different ages. You won't hear them all on Neighbours - frankly, some of them are generally deemed offensive to the ears! I could just as well say that England's accents divide neatly into the upper class accent, the middle class accent and the lower class accent. It's just not true.
We have so many accents for a few reasons:
1. The Aboriginal people already had a huge number of different languages, influencing the way that they'd learn English.
2a. Convicts and colonists came from many different parts of the UK and often settled together, staying on the same piece of land for many generations, so my great grandparents and everyone around them, for instance, spoke much as though they were still in living in Tipperary, as their own great great great grandparents were, while other townships might have been settled from York, Bristol, Staffordshire etc., though the majority came from London.
2b. Numerous new waves of refugees and other migrants have shown up since colonisation and their native languages have imparted something to their accents.
3. Australia is very big and has a small population, so much of that population spent hundreds of years very rarely hearing people from the next town speak.
4. Australia has many strange sounding animals and just like dogs and their owners tend to converge in personality and appearance, many Australians have grown closer to the animals around them in their accents, which often resemble those of cockatoos, kookaburras, Flap the Platypus or a lyrebird imitating a buzzsaw.
5. Someof the accents developed to such an acute degree that nobody else could stand them and if they could, they probably couldn't understand them, reducing the danger of any sort of mixing.
6. Australia, like most modern democracies, is a deeply fascist country, so it resists external influence, preventing homoginisation with immigrant accents in many areas.
7. Young Australians are all contemptable traitors and watch enough Anime, Twitch and Netflix that they've forgotten the ancient ways.
It certainly is the case that regional accents have been disappearing at what seems to be an exponential rate under the influence of radio, television and the internet, but it's still possible to hear them.
Anyway, I don't agree with all of the contents, but it was a fun video and I applaud you for the accent that you used throughout; you could certainly pass as a native.
Glad you enjoyed it. Thanks for your amusing comment.
An other part of Australian English is rhyming slang e.g Captain Cook = to have a look. This has declined over the last 20 years. If you want someone on TV who used to do it a bit Daryl Somers who hosted a show called hey hey it's Saturday.@@DaveHuxtableLanguages
I have noticed that a number of Asian ESL accents have incorporated the intrusive "r" into words even when there is no additional word after names such as "Chinar", "Asiar" and "Australiar".
Yes I’ve heard that a lot in China.
That could could be related to hard attack as well. I think possibly they lengthen the last syllable slightly but still end with a glottal stop. It kind of tricks the non-rhotic ear into hearing a 'non-rhotic r', so to speak.
They might be from Beijing. They use a thing called 'er hua' which adds 'er' to the end of certain words. Curiously, it is taught as a standard part of Mandarin classes for non native speakers as well.
Holy moley, im a bit shocked you're not one of us. I had you picked as someone who grew up in NZ, and spent most of your life in AUS.
The tempo you speak is absolutely spot on, just missing the flippant expletives.
Outstanding.
Wow. Thank you!
Interesting Dave! Not forgetting their love of shortening words; ute, Brissy, Tassie, avo, arvo, brekky, truckie, Chrissie, defo, facey, maccas, servo, Straya, tinny, etc.
I love those - though the focus here was on pronunciation.
No-one says Facey 😂 and 'straya is often said sarcastically 😊
What is facey meant to be?
@@secretagentpaul9078 the social media platform, apparently
@@secretagentpaul9078I'm guessing he means Facebook.
Fun fact though the term Selfie actually came from Melbourne, it's a classic Aussie shortening that caught on globally.
Damn, Dave. You bloody nailed this... I also thought you were Aussie til I read the comments. Well done!
@@AussieEnglishPodcast wow thank you!
Well done, Dave. I concur with other comments about our regional differences and the change over time. One thing you haven’t picked up is the difference across space and time in how ‘a’ is pronounced. The geographic difference is very clear in Newcastle (NSW, long a) and Castlemaine (Victoria, short a). A change I have noticed over the last few decades is in how ‘dance’ is pronounced, with ‘dahnce’ now being the norm; even my younger sisters have changed their pronunciation - but I haven’t, perhaps because the change happened when I had already ‘permanently’ established my pronunciation.
Those of us who grew up in Castlemaine Victoria can always spot interlopers as they use a long a 😂
great video! i didn't pick up on the fact that you might not be aussie until a few minutes in... a few mistakes tipped me off, but overall your accent is really consistent and convincing. if this wasnt a video on the australian accent, i wouldn't have questioned it. also a really interesting video on aussie accents overall. the bit about many of our Ls being dark Ls makes so much sense - whenever my linguistics professors try and get me to feel the difference between light/dark Ls i can never work it out!
I saw a great example of how we say things so differently between USA and AU- ask someone to say this sentence-
"Ask the master to pass the banana".....lol, its funny to see our differences in the same language.
I still don't believe these comments saying you're not Australian. Your accent is flawless
blimey - you had me fooled at the start mate - until I heard a few English accents later - wow good job ! As for Oz accent as at Cockney from 1787, reminds me of words still used in the USA that originated from England way back like 1492. At the end 'my fellow Americans' - wot ? Now I've no bloomin' idea where you originated. Never seen so many dipthongs thrown around in one place !
I find often if you can’t tell the location from the accent itself (though there are definitely regional differences, and after living in the UK for a few years, I can usually pick where other Aussies are from when I hear them), then you can pick where someone is from by the words they use, potato cakes or scallops, bathers or swimmers, etc.
potato scallops, togs. Guess where I am from, lol
No Idea! I say potato cakes and togs, so there must be a bit of a Venn diagram happening with usage! @@fionaottley4976
Verges, polony, blood noses.
@@fionaottley4976 I'd say probably Qld. probably north of Rocky
WA and SA both have distinct accents that are British leaning (to an Aussie ear) as do the NT and Far North Queensland (both very broad, both influenced by Aboriginal language, FNQ has Italian influence I reckon).
I agree with this. There's basically a three-way split between northern, south-western, and south-eastern.
I came here to find out what my own accent is
And what did you discover?
Wait wait wait, you AREN'T Australian???? I couldn't even tell
Hey mate, this is pretty good, but it's 1788, not 1787. That's a pretty serious fundamental error.
Western Tasmanians have a regional difference but it is rare as few people live there and new comers have come in. Most Tasmanians have a very similar pronunciation to other Aussies.
It's all about the sound of the pronunciation, I have lived and worked all over Aus but everyone can pick I'm from the West Coast of Tas. went to High school in the Adelaide hills but the South Australian sound didn't rub off.
You didn't go into the 'Army' Accent which is a variant of a lower class accent and adopted by soldiers from all social classes.There is also the tempo difference. Queenslanders and Northern Territory tend to speak a more slowly than say Victorians. Finally, there is an Irish influence, mostly in the lower class accent e.g. where 'oi' is used instead of 'I'
I struggle with the characterisation of the pronunciation difference in the dance vowel between South Australia and the Eastern states. The way you, and seemingly most linguists, characterise it, æ/a: the two are almost indistinguishable. To my ear, as a native Eastern Australian with several South Australian friends, the pronunciations are far more distinct. Eastern pronunciation of the dance vowel is far higher - closer to ɛ - while the southern pronunciation is far further back - more like ä.
Moreover, no one in Australia pronounces dance with the short trap vowel æ - that would sound very "British" to an Australian ear.
I don’t rhyme France with Dance (frarnce vs Dan ce) I will ask around to see what others do here…
@@pauls8456 im from Sydney and everyone rhymes those 2 words
Mate that was outstanding. T🎉hat was easily the best Aussie accent I've ever heard a non Aussie pull off. And super interesting to boot.
Hi bennyc
What a flawless Australian accent. All your accents are flawless. But this is probably my favourite just because it's probably my favourite accent in general. Although I also love that you do my native East Anglian accent proud, you even did a bit in this video haha. And what an amazingly well put together video. Very informative and interesting. Top stuff.
I don't like cockney... but you do it well.
Wow. Thank you. And thanks for all your comments - you were on a roll.
@@DaveHuxtableLanguages Haha yeah. Well, I was drunk. For better or worse.
As an Aussie I'm just blown away. Had seen your other videos and always thought 'this guy does the best accents I've ever heard' but could never verify it. Now you've had a go at mine Dave, I can say it for sure. What is your method? Do you write out your scripts in IPA?
Thank you for bringing some joy to my Thursday morning.
Wow, thank you! I'm so glad to have brought you some joy. No, I don't write them out in IPA. It's quite hard to describe my 'method' if I have one. I definitely think all accents have an articulatory setting - tighten this muscle, relax that one, hold the lips like that. If I think of an accent, I can click into it. The phonetics comes later, where I can imitate something and then instrospect about what my mouth is doing to produce it.
@@DaveHuxtableLanguages I appreciate that insight into your method. My (American Midwest) ear is not so discerning. I have to be given the articulation and the sound together before I can make any sense of the differences. You provide both which is so appreciated.
I'm from Adelaide and I can tell someone isn't from there by listening to them saying words like "plant, Grant, transport" etc.
That was FUN 🎉😂. EXCELLENT. Cheers mate, thanks from Herefordshire.
Glad you enjoyed it
if you are trying to speak like an aussie ask yourself one question whats the most dumbed down and lazy wa you could possibly say that sentence and 9/10 you'll get it right
There’s a reason why we talk out of the side of our mouths here in QLD.
…..It’s to keep the flies out.
There are definitely regional accents here. I live 2 hours outside of Sydney and I can tell the difference between if you're one hour either side, east or west of where I am.
you went a bit too New Zealand LOL. doesn't sound true Aussie unfortuently! good try though :)
You are one of the very few to get Melbourne right. Very impressed.
You need to do a video on our distinct Aussie dialect of slang now.
That's one hell of an Aussie accent you've got there. Especially doing the general accent when most can only do the broad.
Excellent Australian accent there! Very impressive.
In South Australia we say dance as dahnse, vase is vahse.. your accent sounds very much South Australian
I didn't realise this bloke was a Pom until I read the comments. 🤣 Well done on the convincing Aussie accent!
nearly convincing Australian accent, your i’s sound Kiwi
When you said "class" based at 1:35, you constricted the back of the nasal passage on the A sound. This requires more effort and energy than just saying "class" with open vocal sound on the A. So this proves that Australian is not lazy speach.
I would never imagine Australian, or any accent, to be ‘lazy speech’. That’s often a snobby way to put people down.
As I said in an earlier comment I say the short 'a' in class, fasten etc 90% of the time. No idea how this metric compares to other Australian [Melbourne in my case] people.
Fess up Davo - u were born & bred in Oz & have become a US citizen. 😂
as an australian, our accent is fkn weird, i put it on par with south african (and NZ obviously) for weirdness
Wait.... he's not an Aussie like us? It always throws me when I hear someone not from here nail our accent.
A lot of the early convicts came via the Exeter Assizes, so would have had Devon, Cornish etc accents, all rhotic. The famous Mary Bryant came from Cornwall. I am surprised this rhoticism did not survive, given many of the early convicts and settlers were also Irish with similar rhoticism. To my Westcountry ears, Aussie and East Angian accents sound very related, which they probably are, as London accents of the mid to late 18th C were esssentially corrupted East Anglian accents.
Also, a bit of myth about 'Westcountry' accents and the 'ai' diphthong in words like 'I', 'rice' and 'like' etc. Devon and east Cornwall (my region), traditionally has a monothong, so those words are pronounced with a a vowel more like 'ah'. Listen to the vowels and diphthongs from these Devon maids; ruclips.net/video/WUiETH4le20/видео.html. It contrasts strongly with the east and north of the Westcountry up in say Bristol or Wiltshire, mistaken for general Westcountry accents.
Legend has it that South Australia has the cultivated accent not due to it's later colonisation, but due to the fact that it was the only colony that didn't accept convict ships. Probably started by South Australians who try to look down on the interesting states.
I can’t imagine that ordinary people spoke that differently from convicts, especially given the very minor crimes that people were transported for.
I think the story goes that they deliberately spoke in a 'posher' manner to differentiate themselves due to their perception of being 'better.'
@@DaveHuxtableLanguages South Australians do something unique; they pluralize things a lot. For instance they will say the brand Holden as Holdens. NO idea why.
I never knew people from Adelaide looked down on the rest of us.
The rest of us never even think about Adelaide.
@@musicalneptunianbecause Holden was originally South Australian. He had a big factory there before any GM involvement
Wow this is a fantastic Australian accent. One of the best I've ever heard, congratulations. Only a couple of weird sounds that stand out 😂
Kangaroos do make a sound something like that, but their accent changes from city to city.
you sound like a teenage migrant to QLD 😆 bit of NZ and SA in there
"What's that Skip? Only kangaroos from NSW make that clicking noise, the rest are such heavy smokers they communicate by coughing?"
🦘
I went to UNi at JCU in Townsville in the mid 70s - we found that you could pick accents and colloquialisms - it was possible to identify by their speech people from Cairns, Tully, Mt Isa, etc. Most interesting were the twin towns of Ayr and Home Hill about 5 kms apart separated by the Burdekin river - you could pick whether someone was from north or south or the river in their speech.
Voicing of s in-between vowels in English ie allophonic in American English.
Saying Aussie with an S makes me sound latino. (I'm Cajun, so... Not far off but still. Not my accent.)
Its the land down under, so errythings upside down, so you aint in Kansas anymore, so youre Ozzies too 😅
They're certainly not Us-ies, then we'd be themies.
@@EchoLog the ‘correct’ version is indeed with /z/. There are plenty of voiceless /s/ examples between vowels in US English though. Buses, voices, fussy, bassoon etc. Weirdly I’ve heard a lot of younger Americans saying [haʊsɪz] for houses recently.
something that might interest you is that the way Aussie English is divided up (cultivated, general, broad) is pretty old-fashioned as it predominantly focusses on anglo-celtic Australians. Australia has had significant migration post-WW2 (and more from the 70s) and the migrant populations have also formed their own accents - for example, in Sydney, there is a widely-recognised 'Wog' accent (for want of a better term) which is used by people of predominantly Mediterranean and Middle-Eastern heritage. Note that this is not the accent of the migrants themselves in most cases, but rather their children and grandchildren born in Australia. For an example of this, take a look at some of Superwog's videos. Similarly, children and grandchildren of asian migrants have developed their own accent as well - as an Aussie, I can tell when talking on the phone if I am talking to someone of a particular migrant heritage.
The classic classification of Australian English into 3 accents also means Aboriginal English gets left out as well.
Overall the video was well done though and you pulled off the accent quite well.
Thank you. One day I’ll come and do some in-person research.
WHAT?!? THIS GUY ISNT AUSTRALIAN?!?!?! I’m Aussie and I even didn’t notice you were English
That’s good to hear. Thank you!
I was born to an American father and an Australian mother. They took me to the US as a newborn and I came back to Australia at the age of five. When people would ask me my name I’d reply “Kylie” and they’d say “Kaylie? how do you spell that?” I’d spell my name and they’d say “Ohhh KOILIE! Why didn’t you say that?”. It took me ages before people could understand me.
As a student of linguistics while at Uni, former English teacher and a lifelong mimic of all kinds of accents, I'm really impressed by your excellent videos, not least for the outstanding job you do with Australian and British/Irish accents. An interesting feature of Australian English which has emerged in the last 30 years or so is what could be called "New Cultivated". Spoken largely by Gen Z and younger speakers, especially in formal situations, it's characterised by flattened/lengthened "ee" "ay" and "oo" vowel sounds, more usually heard in the US, although it's altogether different from a US accent but that may well be the influence. Also an accent common among children and grandchildren of Mediterranean and Middle Eastern migrants, which "shushes" the "s" sound before a "t" or "tr". It's so pervasive that general speakers can often be heard to do it. There's a PhD in this I'm sure! Maybe one day... I have a few other theories and observations about our regional variations, which are not just lexical and phonic, but also in rare cases, syntactical. Happily subscribed and looking forward to more! Cheers mate! You're a dead set legend!
Funny thing with me, born and raised in Texas, is that when I talk about Australian Rules Football, I drop into an Australian accent for the duration. It just happens. I don't force it, I'm not trying to do it, it just happens. Is that a thing, where an accent manifests itself spontaneously like that?
Very much so! People's accents regularly change to fit the social context, often without them even noticing. Talking to someone with a broader accent? Your accent will broaden; talking to someone posh? You'll sound posher too. It makes a lot of sense that the context of "talking about Australian sport" would make your accent shift Australia-ward
@@ButzPunk is there a name for that?
@@An_Economist_Plays I'd categorise it as a kind of "code switching". A lot of the focus in research is on bilinguals switching between their two languages, but the concept covers switching between different registers or accents as well.
@@ButzPunk read more on code-switching and, yep, that's me. Interesting it also includes mixing languages together like Spanglish or Hinglish, which I will do a lot of. The funniest example was when I was in Chile and infused Tex-Mex expressions into my Spanish, like "lonche" (lunch) and saying "porque why?" when just "porque" would have sufficed. 🙂Thanks for responding, I have learned to-day! 🙂
Australian here. My sister and I both find ourselves going 'a little bit english' when in awkward work situations. Mostly within hospitality/customer service settings when a customer is angry. We don't mean to, it just happens...
Love this one!
I lived on the NSW/QLD border and used to enjoy picking if people were from north or south.
There also seemed to be a coastal/inland distinction too, where the surfy ones seem to block the nasal passage, and the inland had a drawl.
Melbourne has a unique accent, just a notch deeper.
And yes skip, I pressed the button.
That's what I noticed too growing up in far north Queensland,
In far north Queensland we spoke with a completely different accent from southern Queensland
There is a difference between north an south Queensland
Same in NSW and when I move back to my families ancestral district on the NSW table lands there was a clear difference between regional NSW an the coastal English speaker's
Spoken with a drawl sounds like hillbilly English or even ebor English my friend couldn't even understand people from ebor back country ha ha
The only perfect Aussie accent I’ve heard. That’s an amazing accomplishment!
The first fleet left England in 1787 but arrived at Sydney Cove in January 26, 1788. Sailing ships = slow.
Yes, I wrote down the departure date rather than the arrival, messing up a date that every Australian knows by heart. My only defence is that the kids were probably already speaking Strine on the ships.
Almost flawless accent. Gobsmacked.
Some differences not covered: Victorians say the short /a/ in 'castle', whereas everyone else says 'c-ah-stle'. NSW people say 'poowel' whereas we say 'pool'. Or this was true when I was growing up, anyway.
Hi bethany