Australian English accents

good day today we're going to be looking at some of the phonetic features of Australian English how they got to be that way and then comparing them to accents from other parts of the English-speaking world now who am I to be talking about Australian English you might ask but don't worry I've studied under some of the Masters of Australian pronunciation Neighbors Home and Away the Sullivans and none other than Skippy the Bush Kangaroo I think one of the most striking features of Australian English is the vowel in the word price as in I like Ty rice now people have described this as being like o i the Valen boy but it isn't if you compare that to other accents that actually do have an oi like uh Val you get stuff like um Birmingham in the UK I like Tyro the West country I like tyy r Ireland I like Toy Roy and East Anglia I like Toy Roy so the Australian D thong starts at the back of the mouth the kind of vow that you'd get in cogne Palm r i i now it might be some rounding but it's definitely not oi when we look at accents of English and other parts of the english- speaking World we're normally talking about big Regional differences that's not the case in Australia for reasons that we'll look at a bit later instead there's more of a class-based distinction between cultivated Australian General Australian and Broad Australian it's the general kind we'll be looking at today another feature that really stands out to me and says oh yeah that speaker Australian is the last vowel in comma which is much more open and further forward in the mouth than the equivalent in RP comma or in indeed General American karma is that a new hamster the old one was better it matched the sver this also happens in the way that many people say the D thong in near so you get is there any good beer near here a question I get asked a lot is how come there are so many different accents within a very very small space in England whereas a country the size of Australia is pretty homogenous well several reasons for that firstly people have only been speaking English and in Australia since 1787 all of the people who arrived there as Colonists came in through a small number of ports and communication between those ports by ship was quite constant meanwhile they were pretty cut off from the mother country people also very quickly formed a strong local Australian identity of the 1,373 people who landed in Sydney Cove in 1787 as part of the First Fleet 20 were babies who'd been born on the way they joined other kids as the first speakers of Australian English the English they were exposed to was a mixture of workingclass accents from all over England Scotland Wales and Ireland there were 15 officials and passengers in the First Fleet and we can imagine that they spoke some precursor to RP everybody else was split 50/50 between convicts and their families and crew members of the ships and Marines and their families and all of those people would have had Regional workingclass accents accent leveling started to take place and that's a process where you kind of shave off the rough edges between each other's accents and you kind of get you end up with what you have in common predominant accents among that group of people the first colonists were from the southeast of England and London so cotney a lot of features come through into Australian English today but it's also a picture of the stage of development that cogne had reached at that stage in the mid to late 18th century so the features I mentioned before the price Val so sentence in CNE would come out as I like Ty rice and also that feature of the vowel in comma is that a new amster I like the old one better it matched with a sofa non rism is a feature that was developing in Southeastern England at the time that means not having RS at the end of syllables so no R sounds after vowels or before consonants most parts of North America which were colonized earlier still have ours in words like Park and star but some parts of North America especially ports on the East Coast were in constant contact with England for a lot longer so they picked up that tendency to stop pronouncing the RS it was already advanced enough for Australia New Zealand and other parts of the Southern Hemisphere to go along with that Trend so Australian English today has words like stard and Park it also has the feature of intrusive are so you get phenomena such as Law and Order and Australia is a nice place on the other hand there are features that we very strongly associate with London English that hadn't happened yet when people started Living in Australia these include th fronting so in London I think I thought I Ur you cry whereas in Australia I think I thought I heard you cry and H dropping a 100 hungry Hogs hurled hoops at the Hoy herand and under angry hugs old oops at the Y erands and te globalization Betty Burton bowled better the later she started as opposed to Betty Burton bold better the later she started in that last example about Betty Burton batting better you'll notice that we get T voicing between vowels or flapping between vowels which we also hear in North American English another huge change that was happening in London at the time was the split between trap and bath so that a vowel in some words stayed the same but in others moved further back and got longer so you got a difference between words like trap and words like bath or in cogni it was trap bath at the time this was looked down on by Posh people and didn't really become accepted until the 19th century people took this change with them to Australia though even though it was only halfway through so you get some words in Australia that match the southern English pronunciation with the long vow and others that don't this also varies across the country so this is one area in which there is less homogeneity than in other features South Australia was colonized just that little bit later so that's why there's more match between those words that have the r the Palm Val in South Australia and the south of England so while people in Hobart brisban Melbourne and Sydney are dancing the night away Adel lians are having a nice dance that short a sound is similar to cotney but the long ah is further forward in the mouth and more open than the cotney r Australian English displays what's called Goose fronting whereby the vowel in Goose is pronounced quite far forward in the mouth and in Australia is actually a diff thong would you say boo to a new Blue Goose or would the goose say boo to you this is in contrast to cogne which has quite a back pronunciation would you say boo to a new Blue Goose or would the goose say boo to you RP would you say boo to a new Blue Goose or would the goose say boo to you we also hear this in Manchester would you say boo to a new Blue Goose or would the goose say boo to you Scotland would you say boo to a new Blue Goose or would the goose say boo to you and Northern Ireland would you say boo to a new Blue Goose or would the goose say boo to you stressed I is often pronounced as schw in Australian so we get especially in grammatical endings like es or plurals and EDS for past so buses wanted needed we also hear this in the unstressed versions of Words like it and is is it dead other examples are rabbit Alice and Martin stressed ear is much higher in the mouth than the Cockney and RP varieties so you get fish and chips and this is in contrast to the New Zealand ax head which is very similar to Australia and often confused with it but where even the stressed a comes out of schah so fish and chips as opposed to Australian fish and chips lves are very dark even Feliz so pronounced with some tension in the throat across the board in Australian English so words like like blink pull milk Etc sometimes you get the kind of L vocalization that you hear in London with words like Po and milk um but this again tends to be heard more in parts of the country that were colonized later the goat V is an amazing in Australian English and it's undergone some changes recently in closed syllables it's O I wrote about goats on my boat but in open syllables it has a diff thong that moves forward in the mouth ending in something similar to the French O so go don't go there's an even more recent phenomenon among young people that started apparently in South Australia whereby that open o ends in a bunched R there's an excellent video by Dr Jeff Lindsay that I'll link to in the comments oh and by the way a quick note for my fellow Americans The Familiar term for an Australian is an Aussie not an osie using a nickname implies a certain degree of familiarity so if you then get it wrong it really blows that out of the water imagine if you were trying to pass yourself off as a big Rolling Stones fan but kept calling MC Jagger Mike Jagger what's that skip no I'm not going to tell people to subscribe and click the Bell icon they know if they want to see more videos that's what they have to do anyway do you know that kangaroos don't make that noise thank you so much for watching and I'll see you soon bye for now if you've enjoyed this video you'll love this one which is all about the English accents used in England

Channel: Dave Huxtable

Views: 169,136

Keywords: australian accent, Aussie pron

Id: rWCVFw1vK6g

Length: 11min 30sec (690 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 17 2023