Bruce Moore’s new book, Speaking Our Language: The Story of Australian Language got a fair bit more press coverage – in the news pages as opposed to the reviews sections – than is usual for a tome authored by an academic. And why not? It’s a lively read, and one that is likely to inspire a lot of curiosity and interest above and beyond the questions of whether Ned Kelly spoke with an Irish or an Australian accent and whether talking like Alexander Downer and Crocodile Dundee at opposite ends of the accent pole is on the way out.
What I found most interesting about Moore’s work was the close attention he gives to the intimate links between language, place and culture. (Incidentally, there’s something of a moral here about how cultural studies first arose – a tale told neatly by Raymond Williams in Writing in Society – as a counterpart to the separation of supposedly timeless aesthetic qualities from their social contexts.) Moore tracks the creation of new words, shifts in meaning and the appropriation of Indigenous names to the distinctive geographical and social formations of a culture forged by the interplay between colonisation, landscape and dispossession. The ups and downs of the reputation of Australian English follow the ebb and flows of nationalism, particularly as related to Britain and the idea of Empire.
Moore is well placed to communicate the results of recent academic research on the origins of accents – dispelling misconceptions about the putative derivation of the Australian accent from “Cockney” (he demonstrates in passing that “Cockney” didn’t mean what we think it means in the Nineteenth Century) intermingled with Irish forms of speech. After all, as he argues, the population composition of all the British outposts in the Southern hemisphere was quite similar – yet very distinct accents developed in Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and the Falklands. He draws on research done in New Zealand to establish that new accents form through a process of selection among children of the second generation. It’s well known that linguistically, the family is not the primary vehicle of socialisation for language acquisition and the broader culture and particularly schooling play a much larger role. Hence the phenomenon of second generation immigrant populations often being bilingual and speaking English without the accent of their parents’ country of origin.
Moore explains that there was extensive dialectical variation among the first colonists, and that the second generation tended to smooth over the variation by rejecting the most extreme forms of dialectical pronunciation. So the second generation spoke what were in effect ideolects, but ideolects which sound more alike than different. One more generation and further adjustment by individuals to what is in effect the median of pronunciation and you have a recognisable accent, which then, although it changes over time, has a lot of robustness. In Australia, this stage had been reached by the 1830s or 1840s. The foundation of other cities from Sydney and the fact that – Bush Legends notwithstanding – the Australian colonies were highly urbanised from the beginning – explains the lack of regional variation. Moore thinks there is in fact very little variation in pronunciation across the continent, with Adelaide and perhaps Melbourne having slightly different vowel sounds. Regional differentiation has more to do with vocabulary and stress and intonation, but is still neglible comparatively speaking.
What’s also quite fascinating is that English commentators writing about Australian speech in the Nineteenth Century were almost unanimous in praising the “purity” of Australian English. What this meant was the absence of noticeable dialectical features as found in England. “Received pronunciation” hadn’t yet achieved its hegemony – it was largely a product of the post Arnoldian public school reforms. Think of the way Squire Weston talks in Tom Jones – posh folk in Eighteenth and early to mid Nineteenth Century England spoke in accents proper to their regional origin, and there was no class distinction of anything like the same force as subsequently developed.
The invention of “Cultivated Australian” was a product of school inspectors, the establishment of private grammar schools and a shift away from nationalism among professional elites in the very late Nineteenth Century. The ABC had a lot to answer for in the Twentieth Century. Intriguingly, Moore suggests that “Broad Australian” was born at the same time – from a democratic levelling instinct, as it were, exaggerating the distinctive features of the Aussie accent to annoy those who’d decided that they were the people’s “betters”. Moore thinks “Cultivated Australian” started to disappear very quickly from the 1970s onwards, and associates this change with a revived climate of nationalism. Broad Australian is on the way out too, with studies finding it’s on its last legs among the younger generations today. So we’ve gone full circle in about a century – back to having only one predominant accent.
There’s also a point to be made here about the exaggeration of half a century’s worth of dire warnings about the influence of American televisual and film culture on Australian English – it’s been negligible, and the small extent to which there has been some influence has been more about creative and conscious adaptation. No doubt there’s a motto here about the overblown nature of “cultural imperialism” theses and the resilience of vernacular cultures.
Moore writes interestingly and well, and wears his considerable learning lightly in Speaking Our Language. It’s thoroughly recommended. You might also pick up some new rhyming slang, which I was somewhat surprised to learn wasn’t something here from the beginning (the cant often spoken by convicts gave birth to nonstandard words and meanings) but a feature that kicked off after the Great War and showed a lot of creativity and inventiveness before running out of steam sometime around 1970. There are lots of surprises and delights like this in the book.
Yes, its an interesting issue, and I hear the author interviewed recently.
I am in the rare position of having heard Paraguayan -Australian English, as she is spoke by the descendants of Lane’s fateful utopian voyage in 1893. A declining dialect, perhaps a remnant of old Australian English.
I can tell you its …. colonial – with milder, less offensive shades of those pesky South African/NZ vowels, ‘ABC’ English of the 40s, Scottish r, and good ol’ strine.
I suspect the settler ‘English’ accents are all random variations on a theme, but within a defined spectrum: what happens when you put 3 Southern Poms, 2 Northern Poms, 2 Scots, 2 Irish, and 1 Welsh in a room – and let them evolve a society.
Remembering that colonial office policy for free settlers through the entire 19thc in Australia was that they emigrants should replicate the relative population proportions of the 4 ‘British’ nations.
Mark and All:
This is, for me at least, a very interesting subject …. however, despite having an excellent library in the shire, it will probably be many weeks before I will be able to get a look at this book.
I do hope this history is not just another bit of the usual orthodoxy in the style of Henry Reynolds and Keith Windshuttle.
Rhyming slang ….
Huh? That’s an interesting assertion. Then perhaps some of the very old people I knew when I was a kid and who used rhyming slang quite naturally might have hitched a ride with Dr Who in the Tardis?
Excellent review, thanks.
Looks like it’s worth a captain cook.
It looks to me from skimming over this post that this new book does not even bother to acknowledge the various Australian accents that developed within migrant communities.
You do realise that we are Australian citizens?
Again, we are invisible to the mainstream unless they want a souvlaki.
I was thinking the same recently, Savvas, you’re right – 2nd and 3rd gen migrant community accents are totally distinctive, and very Australian too – don’t occur elsewhere. Same with Aboriginal English.
Mind you, I havent read Moore’s book – maybe he discusses it.
It does sound like an interesting book, but I agree with Savvas and Lefty E that Moore doesn’t seem to have much of an ear. Maybe I got sensitised at a school with a large number of second- or first-generation Greek and other European students, but can’t he hear why Effie is funny, for example, or the Wogs Out of Work crew? (Much less hear the difference between the Greek and Middle Eastern Australian English.) Or Prue and Trude, or for that matter Kath and Kim?
There are very specific yet extremely obvious regional differences. Melburnians pronounce the short E before an L as a short A and vice versa. (“I’ve got a collection of Alvis elbums.”) South Australians are incapable of pronouncing a terminal L and pronounce it as a W (“Poor Jiw, she’s very iw”) which tends to distort the preceding vowel into a long O. (“There are crowds in the city as people rush to the Christmas sows.”) NSWelshpersons and Queenslanders say skewl, pewl and Newcassel, and South Australians think this sounds rooly rooly strange. The fact that Moore thinks it’s SA and Vic that are ‘different’ suggests to me that he comes from NSW — someone from any other state would be more alert to his own status as regional or marginal.
Where is Professor Henry Higgins when you need him?
Yep, I tend to think there’s a bit more variation than he suggests – I’ve certainly noticed it – but I think the point being made is that it’s pretty homogenous compared to accent variation in, say, North America.
And I apologise – there is indeed a chapter on Indigenous and migrant accents. The distinction here, he says, is that they’re reactions to something already established and dominant so you don’t get the same effect in the second generation as with the establishment of the accent originally. He also thinks the only significantly variant accent is from the Lebanese community – which surprised me as well.
I think Moore’s main specialisation is as a lexicographer rather than in this area, so maybe that accounts for it.
“Where is Professor Henry Higgins when you need him?”
Just waiting, as per instruction no doubt.
Furious agreement here with loud condemnation of Moore’s failure to mention migrant accents, if it indeed transpires he has so failed. There’s enough on that subject alone for a decent sized book.
Still sounds terribly interesting but.
Dunno about Prof Higgins, but I did see this link last week to recordings of Aust dialects and accents.
NSWelshpersons …Newcassel.
Actually it’s Newcahssel in NSW, Newcassel & Casselmaine in Vic.
Fucking Victorians. Even just the word ‘castle’ on its own can’t escape the lunacy.
And don’t get me started on Reservor.
I’m fascinated listening to my own teenager and, on the train every day, others of her cohort. They do speak differently to the preceding generation. And yes, the “broad Australian” does seem to be dying out – if anything, they sound a bit Eastern Suburbs to my ear, and we are in the Western suburbs.
I take Pav’s point on subtle vowel variance – but it IS strange that the Australian dialect is so regular.
Even NZ has a genuine regional accent (Southland, near Invercargill – where they trill their r’s Scots-style, in an otherwise standard Kiwi accent).
The real question for me about ’settler English’ is how NZ ended up getting all vowel sounds completely and objectively wrong.
The NZ vowel shift only happened in the 40s and 50s, Lefty E, incidentally.
“The real question for me about ’settler English’ is how NZ ended up getting all vowel sounds completely and objectively wrong.”
You’ve answered your own question LE. Every point of difference btw Oz and Inzid vowels is a case of us going Irish, and them Scots.
Nope, FDB, because like I just said, the current vowel sounds in NZ English are a result of a sound shift in the mid 20th century – before that they weren’t too different to ours.
Also they have sex with sheep. Or so I’m told.
WTF? I didn’t know that. Sounds pretty bloody iffy – got a link?
Yep, here’s a link:
http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract;jsessionid=413F59BC990BF1F6985AB0EBFA064782.tomcat1?fromPage=online&aid=61989
Oh, don’t get me started on teh yoof. It seems to be something to do with eschewing all vowels and keeping your mouth shut as tightly as possible while talking, like that kid in the Pepsi ad trying to fly off the roof, who says ‘Give me a Pepsi Max’ and it comes out something like ‘Gempsymx.’
A sound shift in the mid-20th century for NZ eh? Need to check that one out. Vowel-shifts are usually big events in linguistic development.
Sounds a good read and hopefully an up-to-date one. Take the point about first and second and subsequent gen immigrant dialects … they are particularly Australian in their own right.
As to the currency lads and lasses of the first gen speaking differently from their parents, this is pretty well documented by visitors to the colony at the time who spotted the difference and noted a distinctive ‘twang’ to their speech.
There’s no doubt in my mind or to my ears that our Australian language rhythms as well as vocabulary choices … less so pronunciation … have been influenced by US media in the past 30-40 years, and especially by television.
My kiwi dad (anecdotally) confirms that the vowel thing is an invention of the past fifty years or so, and that he and his siblings (born late 20s, early 30s) never spoke like that – but his post-war baby boom surprise little brother does.
In “The English Languages”, (since borrowed/stolen so I cannot verify the details), there was a German linguist who broke up Australian Englishes into three groups, not by pronunciation, but by vocabulary breadth and grammatical construction.
He defined
* “Australian English” as the main dialect of English.
* “Aboriginal English” as a basolect.
* “Melbourne English” as an acrolect.
Take that Sydney! (And if you can’t guess at the meaning of “acrolect” from breaking it up into word roots, you probably don’t use “Melbourne English”).
Sydney vs Melbourne. The real differences.
Who cares about InZid and when they took a turn to fush and chups.
There’s a far more insidious and horrible dialect metamorphosis happening right now across the country: nasal newsreaders with inappropriate downward inflection.
Initially, it was only Prime Tamworth that sparked a “why do they all speak like that?”, but it seems to have spread quickly to Southern Cross 10 and no doubt it’ll infect NBN out of Newcastle very soon, leaving us only the ABC/SBS as the last bulwarks of newsreading that don’t make your eyes water. Sadly there is no Youtube footage of the horror of Reena Ganga and Fiona Ferguson double teaming poor New England TV watchers. As an example, if you can imagine Jana Wendt with a clothes pin on her nose, you’ll get the idea. (from another Prime station)
Make it stop!
Hmmm. I was born in NZ in the early 1950s and the voices of my childhood all have flat vowels (including my grandparents, born in the 19th century). Of course, memory is often false, but I’m not really sure that this assertion of a major shift on the basis of these recordings is true. I think it’s got a bit flatter over my lifetime, possibly due to more country people (including Maori) in the cities – country people in NZ did tend to have flatter vowels and not to open their mouths as much when they spoke, at least in the past.
Better a downward inflection than an upward inflection? That’s what I reckon anyway?
Here in SA the commercial stations specialise in people — mainly weatherpersons and, sadly, almost all women — who combine the upward inflection with an incapacity to pronounce the plurals of words with a bunch of consonants including an S at the end — risks, frosts, breasts and tasks become riss?, fross?, bress? and tarse?.
But I don’t really mind what newsreaders sound like. I just wish the people who write the stuff would get their bloody grammar and usage right.
Pavlov’s cat wrote:
Well, thankfully it’s just a NSW regional thing then, so there’s some hope.
It’s that kind of thing that makes me think there’s another country somewhere called “Straya” that we accidentally receive the TV signals for. I am, you are, we are arse tray eons
Thats interesting about NZ violating English vowel norms only recently.
I watch a lot of early 70s Strayan flics – and there was definitely a Melbourne accent back then, and certainly stronger class inflections – which seem to have merged since.
‘cept for fossils like Flinty, of course.
Persoanlly, since my grandad was a teacher, and his accent no diffferent to you or I – I reckon a lot of that “ABC accent” was a straight put-on back then to sound more refined and Anglo; back when Menzies ruled the mind, tea-chests ruled the soul, and we were basically a craven pathetic bunch of colonial sucks, pining for the fjords of England; and frankly – the worst were the uni educated, mimicking some sort of Oxbridge style, ‘la distinction’ a la Bourdieu, a la recherche de temps perdu – if you get mon drift to leg.
I dunno about other departments, but as far as English departments in the 70s were concerned, that’s where most of the staff came from — presumably on the assumption that a third-rate Pom who couldn’t get an academic job at home was still going to be better than a good Aw-stralian, all of the best of whom had in any case gone to England. So maybe we just got into the habit of talking like them in order not to be sneered at.
A mate of mine (from Qld) has a theory that there’s an ‘Australian university English department’ accent, transcending regional differences (unless English departments count as a region) and that he and I have both got it. Which I think is probably right.
Of course, these days there’s practically no such thing as an English department left — an ‘Australian university Department of Media, Communications, Creative Writing, Film, Fine Arts, Philosophy, Photography, History, Law, Squash and Advanced Lace-Making’ accent is probably evolving as we speak.
Thast my sense too Pav, about the 70s. Indeed, the film Petersen (flim-blogged at BmL recently!) depicts this crining aspect at Uni Melb circa 72.
On a related note, Ive never udnerstood why culture warriors attack Cultural Studies – as they’re the discipline in academia most interested in Bogan Studies.
PC, I think you’ve got the Melburnian accent a little wrong. I’ve heard plenty of ‘elbums’ for album (although this is by no means a Melbourne-wide phenomenon), however I have never heard an ‘Alvis’ for ‘Elvis’. And the ‘cahsell’ vs ‘cassel’ error will have caused a few blown fuses down here. Use of the name ‘Cahsellmaine’ is considered a capital offence in some quarters.
BBB
Given that the media now includes visual aspects, would anybody care to explain “Queensland Female Newsreader Hairdo” to me? That Jacqui McDonald-like bob that seems to refuse to go away. Is normal hair banned in QLD TV Newsrooms? Or does Jacqui stand behind the hairdressers with a bullwhip and a Jenny Kee jumper ready to inflict pain and visual torture on those who don’t submit to the orthodoxy?
One things’s for sure, homegrown Melburnians have not the slightest idea how to pronounce “Reservoir”.
Many years ago in my benighted yoof I hitched around 3/4 of Australia. (SA, NSW, vic and Qld.) And later drove (actually was driven) all around Tassie searching cor convict ruins and old colonial houses. Now one thing I noticed, and it may not be the same any more, was that people spoke quickly in the south – very quickly in Tasmania – and the speed of speech slowed the further north one got, until it was a virtual drawl in parts of Queensland. And the Victorians were buggers for elocution.Is this still the same?
Kate Burridge, the lexicographer on the ABC’s Can We Help? (which is why I watch it) noted recently that rhyming slang had fallen out of favour with our present yoof.
LE, I said DON’T GET ME STARTED!!!
Now look what you’ve done.
Maybe it’s an east-west thing. I have always pronounced it the same way I would if I were referring to a water reservoir, ie. ‘rez-uh-vwah’ not ‘rezza-voor’.
BBB
Well, me too, BBB: because THATS HOW YOU PRONOUNCE IT IN THE LANGUAGE KNOWN AS ‘ENGLISH’.
Ya hear that, MELBIN??
FDB, the time has come. I can no longer take this ‘rezza-voor’ shit.
We roll tonight.
White Camry wagon
Assists in destruction of
The English manglers
Just realised you were already ranting about that @12, FDB… Sorry for inflaming the issue!
“who says ‘Give me a Pepsi Max’ and it comes out something like ‘Gempsymx.’”
Maybe the yoof have started speaking as if they were texting
I’m in.
BBB, I can report only what I’ve heard, and I’ve heard an awful lot of Alvis coming out of Malbourne. I know several Helens there and they are universally addressed as ‘Hallen’ by Malbourne native speakers.
Also, the thing with the turrets, moat, drawbridge and so on is called a carstle, dammit.
‘Carstle’, my arstle.
I reckon there probably is an English Deaprtment accent, and I know for a fact I don’t have it. How can I get it? Or shall I not bother? After all there will be no departments of anything at all left soon at this university.
The thing is, if you say ‘reserv-waaah’, you just make yourself sound like a wanker. And wankers are not tolerated in Reservoir.
The second person plural is still actually “you” isn’t it?
The north coast’s contribution to civilisation has been to accept yous instead.
“What do yous want to order?”
“How are yous tonight?”
In school ,from teachers no less and all accepted as the norm.
How are yous doing it where yous come from ?
Well my mother was born and bred in Preston and insisted that we call it ReservOR. People who pronounce it VOIR are marked as blow-ins (just ask Mary Delahunty – who was once booed for that transgression by her constituents).
(I think the locals also pronounced a water storage place the same way – my mother did)
FDB, I’ve been given shit too for Reserv-wah. Sorry Laura!
My son says “Hallen”.
I just got Girlchild to say “Elvis” and she did pronounce it “Alvis”.
“Alvis! That’s what I said!!”
Well then it’s all gone topsy-turvy on me. Is your girlchild named Prue or Trude, Helen? If you know that I mean…
BBB
I teach up Reservoir way. To keep in solid with the local wildlife, I call it Rezzy, like they do.
And while we are not getting started, don’t not get me started on the swine who say chooldren not children, and fahhn not foin.
And no mention of ‘aksed’ for ‘asked’ yet. Shame…
Couldn’t tell you where it comes from though.
Amsaddened at Laura’s response to the more lady-like of our contributors.
Reminds me of this telly show on ABC during last summers silly season that talked of three Australian accents; upper or pom, middle and blue-collar suburban or rural okker.
Nothing yet on upspeak, which the doco discussed and Pavlovs Cats comments remind me of the secret societies of undergrads who always clustered round pronouncing “right” as “errrht”, I eventually realised.
Sloppy diction or genuine transgression/ resistance?
Fucking Reservoir.
I notice regional accents, but Carita doesn’t. Hers is Victorian, even though she was born and raised in WA.
Was? It still holds out to this day; just turn on Classic FM and hang out for Damien Beaumont or Colin Fox.
Wonderful things vowel shifts – English speakers are very good at them – but New Zealanders are the current world champions. There is much excited speculation in linguistic circles that they are about to undergo another.
Reason? I suspect we ignore the impact of Indigenous languages at our peril. Accent is the fun part of dialect, but syntax is where the bodies are buried. So syntax wobbles, holds, while accent shifts….
I wouldn’t agree that the American media hasn’t had an impact – maybe this won’t be apparent until a decade from now when today’s children are adults. I have a primary school aged child so often hear kids talking to each other – when they are involved in action play, or retelling the story of a film, their voices become distinctly Americanised. And when they sing, the American accent is very strong. I’ve had to ask if a particular child singing at a school concert was actually American, so strong is the tendency to sing in ‘American’.
Suz,
The entire Australian country music industry is entirely American accented. I initially thought it was an attempt to make US friendly records just in case somebody accidentally made a good one, but even the awful ones have the accent so it can’t be true.
Kids seem to be able to drop in and out of US accents at will though (and I distinctly remember both Steve Austin and Evel Knievel from my own misspent childhood having distinct US accents) – I wouldn’t take much from it.
Kasey Chambers isn’t!
I love Kasey Chambers!
My ears must be shot because not only have I failed to notice that my fellow Melburnians say ‘Alvis’ when they mean ‘Elvis’, I also think that ‘Not Pretty Enough’, which is the only song of Chambers’ I can remember, is sung in an American accent. The “is my heart too broken” bit sounds super-American to me.
BBB
Indigenous accents are an interesting case. In the NT, there doesn’t seem to be any clear common Aborignal English accent. People from Wadeye speak with a noticably different accent to those from the Tiwi Islands or Arnhem Land. I guess that’s to be expected given the range of different languages. The major influencing factor appears to be local, with surprisngly little effect from extensive exposure to Australian English speakers.
So do I, Kim!
My fave is still her Ultimate Country Song, which I admit freely, BBB, is heavily American-inflected. The ultimate country song, she says, must be about love, must be sad, and must mention death and Texas, but she only has the chorus thus far:
Don’t look up my dress unless you mean it,
Don’t you put your hand upon my thigh,
Before you stick that in you’d better clean it,
I hope I go to Texas when I die.
Dr Cat, I’ll never forget the Sopranos episode that ends with the Kasey Chambers song The Captain:
Btw, I vote The Sopranos for best ever use of music… although the L Word comes close.
Oks. LP had to have a Kasey Chambers thread:
http://larvatusprodeo.net/2008/10/16/the-kasey-chambers-thread-lp-had-to-have/
How could we not, if we have a Missy Higgins thread? We need to get our priorities right!
And listen carefully, BBB, she’s definitely not singing with an American accent.
Pavlov’s Cat wrote:
Somebody spitting on your head doesn’t make a rainstorm.
I think I like country music.
btw, peoplw up here in New England, who were born here frequently end sentences with ‘… eh?’
And I yoosta think it wuz a Queensland thing.
As some one who had rellies on the North coast, btw, ‘yous’ is actually ‘yooz’. I think.
Kim, the link doesn’t link!
I have a Canadian friend who pointed out the ‘Alvis’ Melbourne pronunciation. It cracked him up.
And waht is it with the ‘aksed’. It’s really hard to say.
Complaining about country music having American influences is like complaining about Dame Joan always singing in Italian.
My personal favourite is “icksetra”, although I’m not sure that’s uniquely Australian. Fucking ABC even does it, which is pretty disappointing. (Peoplpe’d probably get it right if they’d had more Latin and thrashings at school.)
So interesting!
Without diverting the conversation, may I ask how one can tell in singing, how are accents obvious, because that is when I thought they were always most disguised.
One area of curiousity to me is about the spread of American accent.
To aussie ears, is it heard as a twang, even if it is not a Texan or southern accent?
I can only hear differences in Australian accents when it comes to a Queensland or a sort of schooled one.
AK – some people call it a twang, mostly I think cos we don’t really have a generic noun for the distinctive features of an American accent. But then some say twang meaning rural Australian. More often ‘drawl’ though, given that a twang has a certain lively connotation at odds with our laconic country cousins.
Amanda’s mention of Italian (excellent analogy BTW) reminds me to point out that it is a great deal easier to sing a long vowel than a short one, and a great deal easier to sing with your mouth open than with it closed. Since the Australian accent lends itself to short flat vowel sounds and almost-closed mouths, it’s actually quite hard to sing in.
Another Kim — one of the most obvious things I’ve noticed about Australian singers who sound American (to me) is the long ‘a’ vowel — in most American regional accents this sounds to Australians as though it has an audible R sound at the end of it — ‘carrr parrrk’ — whereas in an Australian accent that vowel is like a Boston accent only more so. There are other things as well, of course.
The most Australian-sounding singers tend to be the singer-songwriters who write for their own way of singing and pronouncing sounds, so neither the music nor the words are at war with their own accents, and it works best when the lyric is a dramatic monologue, ie sung in the voice of the character telling the story, like Paul Kelly’s How to Make Gravy, which is a weird combination of Americanised vowels and very obvious Australian sounds.
Overseas, many mistake Aussies with New Zealanders. Heresy, I know.
It could be worse.
We could mistake you for Sith Efricans.
I am enjoying your in house discussion.
Now here’s someone who sings in her own Australian accent more normally and non-cringe-makingly than anyone I’ve ever heard. Lovely moment at 3.34 when she forgets her own lyrics.
Thanks for that song, Pav. Liked it a lot.
Australians have a nasal and higher pitched essence, even in men.
It’s an attractive accent, anyway.
fine @ 69: “aks” for “ask” is an example of occasional order-swapping (metathesis) of consonants that goes right back to some Anglo-Saxon dialects. Both spellings are known from back then, in some parts of Britain. I guess that decsendants of these folks may still be perpetuating this variation in Oz, and others may have reinvented it themselves.
David Irving (nr) @ 71: I agree. If it is spelt ‘t’, pronounce it /t/, not /k/! Particularly if one if paid to be a standard-setting role model in the form of an ABC announcer.
This velar-for-alveolar swap (k for t, g for d) is a common mispronunciation in kids, which occasionally gets perpetuated and spread by adults and hence ensconses itself in some dialects. I have known at least one adult in the UK who pronounced ‘puddle’ as ‘puggoo’ (/p^gu/ pardon my approximate IPA spelling) and passed this on to their kids.
Such things have always happened, and are how parent languages evolve into multiple different daughter languages.
FDB, I was thinking about what you said.
Surely a word could be coined by yourself and put in common usage.
Okay, Americans speak with a ‘kurn’.
[one must naturally put on a N. American accent mid-sentence to say the word]
ehv alwez bn ettrAHCted t’ tha perpetchally s’rPRISED Norn Iron axsen.
Great inflection, LE
Like the sisters who taught me
The chEEK of ya!
Pavlov’s Cat observes the problem of weather girls, but fails to investigate further, as to the likelihood that, if coming from the “norf”, they will barrack for the “Wristers” not the “Dugs”, “Meggies”,”Sous” or “higgles” and “heags”or “wisties” at local football.
We owe this redoubtable campaigner singular applause, for going where all others failed; the dreaded upspeak; lately euphemised to “upward inflection”. Can someone offer a REAL explanation for this extreme and tortuous curiosity of speech?
Does Kasey Chambers pronounce “baby” as “bebeb”, time as “dem” and love as “Lurv”?
Does Kasey Chambers represent a demographic typified by its tendency not “love too often”, but “too well”?
I think John Safran displays a definite Melbourne accent, which I being from Newcahstle find rather fascinating.
I also had a friend in high school who moved up here from Moe (is that how it’s spelled?) and he had what could be quite a thick Melbourne accent, though his father Maltese (with an Australian accent) so I don’t know if family or community influence on that? Probably not in Moe.
I wont bother with the book. If your above summary is accurate ( I trust it is) Moore has no idea.
Anything’s better than NOO-kya-la for NU-cle-a. Guess who … but not for much longer … hehe.
And please … TERR-iss for TERR-uh-rist?
Many of these comments are about poor pronunciation … slack musculature in the service of clarity. Let’s hear it for clear speech whatever the accent.
On related notes: I’ve never like the construction common in AU “try AND do …” etc. You’ll even see it written.
Surely its “try to…”.
“Anything’s better than NOO-kya-la for NU-cle-a. Guess who … but not for much longer … hehe’
Noo kyala is actually a very common pronunciation – particularly in the southern US. However, many Australian english speakers have difficulty with it as well. Anthony Albanese comes to mind.
It’s maybe related to people trying to compress a three syllable word – nuc le ar – into two.
Yairs, except that nu-clear is closer to a 2-syllable word than nu-cu-lar. I think it’s the reverse – something referring to particle physics and power generation/global destruction must be all sciency and therefore a long word.
Plus the -ular ending evokes lots of sciency words – temporo-mandibular, testicular. I’m sure that’s not all but my brainular function is at Monday morning levels.
*ahem*
I have a Canadian friend who pointed out the ‘Alvis’ Melbourne pronunciation. It cracked him up.
That’s very cheeky of him Fine, considering they do that “aboot” thing!
Most people here have already seen the blog Language Log, but anyone who hasn’t I recommend it very highly – it’s fascinating.
The TV news is good for some strange pronunciations.
“Gulled Coast” indeed!
The most noticeable is the “O” sound with a “W” following it, so that “home” sounds like “howme”.
On top of that, the TV has a very general trend to the NZ flattened vowels.
Perhaps this is a reflection of the southern focus in the electronic media. (Then again, the south-east of Australia IS closer to NZ geographically than it is to much of Australia)
I haven’t heard an accent I recognise as my own on TV, ever.
steve at the pub wrote:
Nuh. Me eever.
I reckon them sheep shaggers rooned the langwich.
New South Welshmen, as you say UteMan, may have ruined the language, but only their Mexican dialect, they havn’t touched my language.