How did the Australian accent come about?

Actually a lot of accents in America espwc7ally Apalachian and New England have the residue if English rural accents. A brigue of sorts. A kind of rolling of the rrrrs

The English country rhotic speech of the West country and east Anglia, is still evident in certain parts of the States actually. I had American friends staying where I live in Suffolk England, and they found the local accent very recognisable.

By the way as an Englishman I actually prefer Americans to Australians by a mile. Australians are very rude and backward thinking quite often.

Three replies and I can't see any of them...

We’re only rude to English fuckwits, R3.

Australian men are still in a macho 1930s mindset. Openly Sexist homophobic and very racist.

A lot of them have a boiled lobster like complexion too.

R7 you are right . Also Australians dont seem to have much in the way of culture.

Fucking hell, is it the same person writing all these replies? Aussies are generally a good bunch of lads and no more sexist, homophobic and racist than your general American, and I've lived and worked in both. As for culture - I'd pit Melbourne against most cities, but what do you expect when the country is relatively young?

The generic "American accent" sounds more Irish than English.

Though there are parts of The South and New England that sound more English.

But I have no idea how the Australian accent evolved. It sounds like nowhere in England.

[post redacted because linking to dailymail.co.uk clearly indicates that the poster is either a troll or an idiot (probably both, honestly.) Our advice is that you just ignore this poster but whatever you do, don't click on any link to this putrid rag.]

It's quite simple: "Very quickly, all the different accents that had arrived in Australia merged into one accent. At first, English people thought the new Australian accent was great. Unlike some of the strong accents and dialects used back in England, the Australian accent was clear and easy to understand, because it was developed by people trying to understand each other.

Then, something changed. A new accent became popular among rich and powerful people in England. This was called Received Pronunciation (RP). RP is very different to any other accents that exist in the UK, and people who spoke with an RP accent back then really looked down on people who didn’t speak like that.

All of a sudden, the Australian accent was considered very rough, people who were rich and highly educated tried hard to change the way they spoke to sound more RP. Even after Australia became independent of the British Empire in 1901, many people were keen to reduce their Australian accents and sound more posh and English. Private Schools in Australia taught students to use RP pronunciation as much as possible.

Today, this means that there are three types of Australian accent. Some people speak with a “general” accent, which is more or less the way it has been for centuries. Other people speak with an accent that is closer to RP English. The third group of people have a “broad” Australian accent. These are mostly people who live in small communities in the countryside, where they weren’t influenced by other accents or by the popularity of RP English. Instead of their accent becoming “less” Australian, it has become “more” Australian, exaggerating the parts of the pronunciation that are unique to the Australian accent.

In short, the way people speak in Australia today is influenced by many different accents you can hear in England today, but these have been blended together to create something completely new."

[quote[ and people who spoke with an RP accent back then really looked down on people who didn’t speak like that.

Still do, gurlfriend.

[quote]Even after Australia became independent of the British Empire in 1901, many people were keen to reduce their Australian accents and sound more posh and English. Private Schools in Australia taught students to use RP pronunciation as much as possible.

Posh people in South Africa also sound very RP English/Kensington.

I’ve had a hard time distinguishing whether someone was English or Australian a few times.

To me, as an American, Australian sounds like Cockney. Am not saying this to be mean at all. I wonder if it has anything to do with the original settlers being convicts.

r14 I've always thought English South Africans sound like educated New Zealanders. r16 There is an element of broadness and vowels that are similar. Australians do have different accents though, if you listen to Steve Irwin vs Rose Byrne for example.

[quotee]To me, as an American, Australian sounds like Cockney.

As a Londoner I don't hear this at all.

The Aussies stretch their vowels as a joke, they talk about Juuuuuune.

I think it's the most infectious of accents. People who move there seem to pick it up very quickly.

Go see Poms!

I just went to Ireland for two weeks and I agree that Irish people are much easier to understand as an American than many British people are. I think that the Irish influence on the US accent must be underestimated, and may be a distinct factor in what makes American English so different than British, Aussie and South African dialects. People from New England and from the US South (East coast) do have distinctly British manners to their speech, but people in the Northeast also have a great deal of Irish and sometimes Italian influence. The awful flat Midwestern US accent has strong German and Scandinavian influence.

Reading the article linked here, it sounds as if Australian developed mainly from a mix of different British accents, whereas I think the US accents show a lot more influence from other immigrant waves. We can hear them regionally, and I do suspect that the huge wave of Irish immigrants probably gave us our rhotic R. The southern and some New England (Boston, Rhode Island) accents still have a lingering dropped R that probably better represent accents of early generations of New World colonists.

There is no more an Australian accent per se then there is an English or American one, there are many different variations, is an English Midlands accent, or a Newcastle and English accent? It's a fascinating subject on how the way we speak has evolved from one common source. I remember hearing Roosevelt in some documentary I was watching and thinking how British he sounded, with what was apparently a Boston accent. It seems that it's most likely that Southern England (most people think this is a British accent unfortunately) as a whole has changed its accent whilst others abroad have not is why the difference is most notable.

All that sun

This says that Irish changed the US accent significantly, primarily affecting consonants (pronounced R), turning —ing into —in’, and dominating standardized pronunciation as settlers went west—so the Mid-Atlantic and all western accents are more heavily influenced by Irish than southern and northeastern.

Meanwhile, according to this, Irish appears not to have influenced Australian consonants much but probably introduced a lot of dipthong vowels to Aussie English.

Brits have multiple regional accents and outside of a few places like Adelaide, convicts were a big part of the population base, so of course the accent is derived from them. People from outside the British Isles were a novelty until after WWII and even then they weren't wanting any Italians moving into the neighborhood, so like the accents of the South (which went through about 2-300 years of no immigration and a lot of Scots-irish ancestry), it had time to amalgamate and deepen.

R21 It’s funny...I was reading yesterday about the dialects spoken by different Game of Thrones actors; some actors speak with their real British Isles accents and some modify them to be more specific to their characters. To most of us Americans, the accents are more or less similar, although Jon Snow’s very Northern accent (which is performed; Kit Harington’s real accent is an upper middle class London accent) stands out. Two other accents that stand out to me are Tyrion’s received promunciation, which unfortunately sounds as fake as it is from the New Jersey native, and Sansa’s (Sophie Turner), which often distracts me from the story—which is really strange. She started the show as a young girl and she never attempted a Northern Brit accent, and instead speaks with her real accent. But to my ears, it sounds kind of...fake. I just think that’s so odd since it’s one of the few ones on the show that isn’t fake! It’s not her pronunciation so much as her inflection, which sounds less singsongy than most of the others’—her sentences are flatter, which sounds more American to me, I guess. American people really do have a hard time distinguishing British accents; to many of us, any non-rhotic dialect sounds “English.”

What is a non -rotten dialect?

r20 to be honest, as an outsider the differences between US accents are really not that obvious. I get the Boston 'jokes' and so on, but you basically sound the same aside from the south.

R27 That’s reasonable. Most US accents are broadly similar, with relatively minor variations among vowels.

I am from Washington, DC suburbs and I speak, I think, with what is close to the “no accent” mid-Atlantic accent that is closely akin to a nationally broadcast news manner of speaking—not much is distinctive here. Although occasionally a twang will pop out of my mouth and surprise me. Boston/Rhode Island, Chicago and (generally speaking) southern accents are obvious to my ear. As I get older and meet more people from throughout the country, New York, Wisconsin and Minnesota accents now are obvious and distinct. Western (Wyoming, Colorado, Nebraska) accents are usually pretty self-apparent but more subtle. Midwesterners have a lot of specific idioms that give them away, but not accents so much, and I am occasionally thrown off by California regions that sound what I would consider (and technically are) western; I think of people from California speaking the same way I do.

Now I can distinctly differentiate among North Carolina vs. South Carolina and Georgia, Louisiana and Texas accents, which are all really very different once you meet enough people from those areas. But even in Hollywood, USA today, any vaguely Southern accent passes for anywhere in the south, whereas that is as unrealistic as any vaguely non-rhotic accent passing as British, or anyone who speaks likena cartoon pirate passing as Irish.

Where are you from?

A hell of a lot of Dubliners must have flooded New York city at some point and influenced the accent permanently, because Dublin Irish people sound surprisingly like New Yorkers. (city, not state.) I'm originally from NYC.

To me, the Dubliners sound like Irish people who came to America and lost most of their accent in time, with only a little remaining.

They don’t sound anything like New Yorkers to me, although NYC was represented *everywhere* that I went in Ireland over the past couple of weeks. The Irish seem to regard NYC as a sister territory, for good reason based upon the history.

Irish is very breathy in a way that sets it apart markedly from other English-speaking accents. At the beginning of the video at R29, for example, a girl on the street says “great,” pronouncing it “graichhhheh.” They exhale at the ends of many words and sentences, and neither the US nor Australia appropriated that.

Some origins of the New York Accent(City NOT state) are Dutch as well as English.

R32 English and Dutch foundations, with Irish and Italian influences.

A few years ago, I moved to Albany, NY. There is no particular accent to this region, but I have encountered a steady stream of people who sound as if they were raised in Queens or Long Island. 'Cawfee" "Tawk" Just like Lawn Guyland. When I've asked if they were raised down state, they all say no. Born and raised in the Albany area with parents born and raised here, too. You could plop them down on Utopia Parkway in Nassau County and no one would know.

I don't think we will ever fully understand all the influences over language. Some, yes. All, no. Mass communication has churned everything and will continue to do so. Short, straight lines from one linguist origin to a particular linguistic result are hard to come by.

Edith and Archie Bunker on All In The Family said Terlet instead of Toilet. I wonder where that comes from. Their characters were NOT Irish or Italian. They were lower middle class WASPS.

R35 They also said “goils wuh goils and men wuh men. We could always use a man like Hoibit Hoover again.”

I could never make out what “Hoibithoovera gain” was supposed to mean until my father told me.

R34- I read once that Albany , New York City has an accent similar to NYC.

R35 It’s probably Yiddish influence.

“There has been a theory for several decades now that relates to the distinctive “Jewish” New York pronunciation of words like coffee, thought and raw. In JNYE, these words have a high, diphthongal vowel (“caw-uhfee,” “thaw-uht,” “raw-uh,” i.e. IPA [ʊə].) Anybody who watched Saturday Night Live in the early ’90’s will remember Mike Myers’ Cawfee Tawk with Linda Richmond segment, exaggerating this very pronunciation.

One supposed explanation is that early Jewish immigrants, lacking a clear vowel for words like strut and cup would use an “aw” ([ɔ]) sound instead. The immigrants’ children, trying to make a more clear distinction between this vowel and the vowel in “thought,” “coffee,” etc, clearly distinguished it by pronouncing it closer in the mouth. Hence “caw-uhfee.”

There’s a theory that the American accent is actually what the English accent would have sounded like 300 years ago or so. It was planted here during colonial times and might have evolved along with the changes in the UK while waves of immigrants were still coming, but by the mid 18th century the population of the colonies was primarily native born. So it would have gone its own way thereafter just as the British accent did.

Remember, languages and accents continuously evolve. It’s funny to think that Jane Austen might have sounded more like Meryl Streep than like Emma Thompson.

R37, some do have a similar accent. Not many. But they keep popping up. And when theydo, they sound very much like Queens and Long Island. It's a small minority of the population, but there is a steady presence.

R31, it sounds very similar like a NYC accent, but not exactly like it. More like a mixture of the two. Let me put it simpler, it sounds more like The American accent, and particularly the NYC accent, than any other in Ireland or the UK. The NYC accent uses the same hard edge on constanents, similar cadence, and rhotic R.

Sometimes I'll be watching some British drama on tv and one of the characters at times sounds American even though they're native born Brits.

R39 U.S. English has been too influenced by many immigrant waves to suggest that across the board, but I do think Southeastern U.S. accents probably are close legacies of what English immigrants might have sounded like. There are many commonalities among the speech, including even vocabulary. My dad grew up in rural NC, and he called the hood and trunk of a car the bonnet and the boot, for example.

I always think of the New York accent as very Jewish/Italian influenced.

[quote]There’s a theory that the American accent is actually what the English accent would have sounded like 300 years ago or so.

A lot of words the Americans still use were used in England a few hundred years ago and have long been replaced..

Pitcher & platter for example...are ye olde English.

This guy is regarded as an authority on what Shakespeare’s English may have sounded like, and it’s less different than the US south *and* NYC than many would expect. But also an equal measure of Gaelic accents, given the rhoticism and the dipthong.

I had guests from the U.K. once, and they liked my accent better than my mother's. We asked why, and they said I sounded more American to them, because she has a strong NYC accent, with the long vowels, and I don't.

Most Americans pronounce ORANGE(OR-ANGE) but native New Yorkers say ARE-NGE. ARE-NGE is the way ALL people in the British isles pronounce it. This also applies to words like foreign and forest. Is that a lingering English/British influence?

Forty seven responses and no one has really answered OPs question. So busy with showing off their knowledge that they can’t even answer the fucking question!

R46-There was a survey done a few years ago. British people were asked which American accents they like the best. They choose two. The NYC accent and the Boston accent. The NYC accent they said was the sexiest and the Boston accent sound the most intelligent.

R48 I did—or rather I linked to an article that discusses theories. I don’t know why anyone would ask a message board, though, instead of seeking out properly researched information online.

[quote]Forty seven responses and no one has really answered OPs question.

I answered his question, so did several others.

[quote] So busy with showing off their knowledge that they can’t even answer the fucking question!

You're coarse, common and stupid

[quote]I don’t know why anyone would ask a message board, though, instead of seeking out properly researched information online.

Because he wanted to start a conversation about it on here, dummy.

R52 And start a conversation he did...and then someone complained about the conversations that it sparked, preferring instead...what, I don’t know? That someone call their doctor-of-linguistics friend and alerting them to an urgent question on a gay message board?

R51, punctuating is a thing, cockbreath.

Boston sounded intelligent to them?

Brits think this is the smartest kind of American.

To [35] I speak yiddish. It does not have the “aw” sound, i.e., diphthong.

Really, R57? Tell me moah. Let’s tawk!

He's right, r58. Yiddish is a combination of Hebrew and German, neither of which have that sound either.

The Flat-A and Hard-R of the American accent is thought to be very close to the original 15/16th century English court accent.

What we think of as "RP" came out of the Germanised court of the Hanoverians. So, essentially, the theory is that present day U accents are the combination of the original American-style (to us) 16th Century English accent combined with the Monarch's German pronounciation of English that was then aped by the courtiers, and then further seeped into polite society.

Edited for clarity: The courtiers were aping the Hanoverians

And we are all still making the mistake that the ‘original’ English was Shakespeare’s English or the standardized dialect spoken in England or Britain when the settlers came to the U.S. That is just silly. There was no standardized language at that time, easily demonstrated throughout Shakespeare’s variable spellings of words including his own name, and certainly without standardized spelling rules there will be no way to even attempt to standardize speech patterns. It wasn’t a notion at the time. Shakespeare’s pronunciations have been reconstructed through spelling choices and couplets in his writing that we think were supposed to have rhymed, and through poetic meter. It’s probably close to reality. But even that was only Shakespeare’s representation of English. His English was Modern-era English, and before that was barely understandable Middle English of Chaucer and before that totally unintelligible Old English of Beowulf, which is essentially an evolution of an archaic version of German.

I took a course called The History of the English Language, and the one hard and fast rule is that there is no correct and no original version of the language; it evolved from a Germanic language structure that was fully changed by Latin influence, and it continues to evolve every single days, mostly in ways that we regard as “incorrect,” but which are natural and inevitable.

I think it's a bit much to say there was no standardised language in 16th Century Britain. There was no standardised spelling of the language, yes.

But if there was "no standardised language" then there is no way any playwright, even one as talented as Shakespeare, to have written any play that could be performed all over the country to widespread contemporary acclaim. And yet, all the audiences, in all the different towns, speaking English in all their very different accents, understood the meaning of Shakespeare's words, and the construction of the sentences.

The accents and the spelling varied wildly, but not the words and their accepted meanings.

R63 OK, that’s fair—but then, no concerted effort by any authority or scholar to standardize usage and spelling, or pronunciation. Spoken language emerges and evolves organically because it is how people communicate with one another. It is somewhat self-standardized within regions because, again, it serves the purpose of conveying information among people.

That is markedly different than anyone publishing dictionaries and grammatical instruction books that espouse rules and define meanings. Those impose limits in an effort to freeze language in time and stop its natural flexibility.

Many people don’t realize that Webster’s New American Dictionary was a political effort to use language as a means by which to cultivate a new American worldview that (in the view of Webster) would cut out unnecessary and impractical ornamentation (taking the “u” out of colour) and to represent our rhotic R as distinct from French-like British (making “theatre”—THEE-uh-tuh—into “theater”—THEE-uh-TURR), etc. Webster understood that language can craft identity and he made a more practical, less metaphorical langauge because he thought Americans should be a more practical, more industrious people. To my knowledge, there were no such efforts in Shakespeare’s day to intentionally cement written and spoken language in a way that is “right,” and to reject what is “wrong.”

According to historians, the English Accent was actually more like the American Dialect. The current English accent is due to the influx of other Europeans. Australia was originally populated by prisoners.

[quote]Aussies [...] use only two-thirds of their mouth to speak because early settlers spent most of their days DRUNK

Australians are the children of alcohol syndrome!!

The above posts about the England version of English changing in the 19th century is correct. The start of public schooling led to the spread of non-rhotic pronunciation by teachers as the 'London' way of speaking was considered correct. Not sure why the upper class didn't pronounce the 'r's, but it could be due to foreign import of aristocracy. The royal family is German after all.

The r's were there for a reason - they were pronounced by most people at one time. In fact, most of the items English people get pissy about are rather recent changes to their language. For example, herbs being pronounced 'erbs' and not 'herbs' - came from 19th century middle class who thought herbs sounded lower class.

There are numerous examples, but it's funny that the English get so upset about Americans or others speaking differently when in fact it is they who changed, not us.

As far as the Irish similarity with American English - that's just because the Irish also kept the similar pronunciation from when English was forced upon Ireland years ago.

The odd thing about the strong Scottish accent is how right it sounds in Scotland but it DOES NOT TRAVEL.

Any Scot I've known in the USA has had to Americanise pretty sharpish.

Didn't Scotland actually have it's own language?

Quick search leads me to >

If watch old American movies of the 1930s - the more "educated" types still sounded very English.

I can't be more specific than that.

The Irish language.

Even young folk can speak it.

Irish is mandatory and taught in all Irish schools. Most Irish people are not fluent in it but all who make it through school should be able to speak and understand it. In some regions, it’s the common household language. It’s not archaic; there was a movement in the 1920s to revive the language, as it had been banned by the British colonists and the newly independent country went to work immediately to preserve its culture.

You might make fun of me for it, but I just went to Ireland with my family and met an Irish cousin in her 70s, and I honestly get choked up and sometimes even cry a little when I think of what was done to Irish people by the Brits. I really had very little knowledge of this history and it was absolutely savage.

That’s the affected mid-Atlantic accent, R69. Although people confuse ‘mid-Atlantic’ to mean ‘mid-Eastern seaboard’ or ‘mid-Atlantic coast’, it’s really calling to the middle point between the States and England, and the accent takes from both’s pronunciation.

Yes r63, I think we understand each other.

R69 - that was an affected pronunciation for films and, for a brief time, among upper classes. It's not indicative of how Americans spoke historically or even of that day. No one spoke like that.

Wow the DL accent nerds really jumped on this one. The accent comes from all the criminals sent to Australia. It's a very low class accent.

R72 Now was that by the British, or do you mean the English or the Welsh or the Scots, or maybe even the Irish when they where part of the Union, in which case that was what the Brits did to the Brits. It's very easy to get casual with the mud slinging but you do need to be specific with what you're saying, and don't forget that even when southern Ireland broke away from the United Kingdom that not everybody thought this was a good idea in the south and more so in the north, you really are messing around with a can 'o worms there. In saying that, Cromwell was a right bastard all around and more so to the Irish, 1649 was not a good year for them, also not that great for the Scottish either, which circles around nicely to saying what the English did to the Irish would be better and not the Brits.

R56 R45 Well done for getting the gay back in to this thread, I've always thought Ben is quite hot, and young me ditto with Marky Mark!

R77 I am speaking of the colonization of Ireland by Britain, the exploitation of Irish families who had absolutely nothing, the absolutely vile attitude that both the liberal and conservative parties had toward the Irish as they were starving and dying of disease during the famine. Queen Victoria gave a mere £2,000 in relief to the Irish while over a million people died, and when a Turkish sultan tried to send help, she talked him down from the £10,000 he had planned to send because she didn’t want to be embarrassed by his generosity. British political leaders were absolutely vicious and cruel, regarding the Irish as nothing more than an economic burden.

Some historians regard Britain’s reaction to the famine as attempted genocide to solve the “problem” of Irish people and to take their territory once and for all.

[quote] The accent comes from all the criminals sent to Australia. It's a very low class accent.

Yes, Australia was a penal colony for England. "Between 1788 and 1868, about 162,000 convicts were transported from Britain to various penal colonies in Australia."

The majority of convicts who were sent to Australia were convicted for petty crimes, such as debt.

Why send criminals to a sunny warm place as punishment?

After watching several Australian TV series on Netflix (I highly recommend the hilarious show Rake), I am besotted with the Australian accent. Easier on the eye, perhaps, is the Bondi Rescue series, which gives you Sydney beefcake and a variety of lovely broad accents.

Ugh, I find the Australian accent extremely ugly. Second only to South African accents. Asian accents are quite ugly too.

R25. Rhotic speech is heard in England in east Anglia and the West country. Up till about the 19th century all of southern England had that rustic speech.

I don't think the standard American accent sounds Irish at all. More west country English.

What about southern accents? My family is from the (US) Deep South, and when my sister studied abroad in England, the English people she got to know said she had a very pleasant 'soft' American accent. However, my sister and I don't sound like our cousins, as education has mitigated our native Florida cracker accents quite a bit.

There is no one NYC accent or influence, as NYC accents vary significantly by the speaker’s ethnic origins, socio-economic class and even neighborhood/borough. I’m sure this is true in most places. Growing up in the Boston area, I could often pinpoint the town or neighborhood someone came from just from hearing them speak. In the greater Boston of my distant youth, neighborhoods tended to be homogeneous- there was an Irish neighborhood, Italian, Portuguese, WASP, French Canadian and so on. Different influences, different accents. It still drives me crazy when Hollywood thinks NY/North Jersey accents are interchangeable with Boston accents.

[quote]After watching several Australian TV series on Netflix (I highly recommend the hilarious show Rake),

I tend to find the Australian sense of humor very juvenile - but I'll check it out.

As I thought - looks like shit.

The Australian accent sounds retarded.

I don't know about retarded, but it's grating.

As a non-native speaker of English, Australian English sounds a lot like British English to me.

I get that r94, but it sounds as if an English person was being strangled while he talks. That's how Australian accents sound.

R94 , if you're a non-native (English speaker), then the different accents would not be that apparent.

Downton Abbey is what made clearer to me the different types of English accents (posh, etc.).

The dingo ate my baby

Cannot abide Australian accents. My next-door neighbor's from New Zealand and it's painful to talk to her. And I like her, mind you.

New Zealand and Australian accents, while both weird to my American ears, are definitely not the same. Australians in general have these prolonged vowels and a lot of them have a rise in their voice at the end of a sentence, which makes them sound rather perky, esp. women. There are obviously different regional accents but in general, there's something genuinely funny about them. New Zealanders have a kind of vowel shift, where short i in American E sounds like short e, etc. Like all the vowels got exchanged for standard English and American vowel sounds. It's kind of pleasant however, Kiwi. I started watching Ozzie TV streaming and I never really get used to it--it's always kind of amusing. What do they call it--"Strine." English regional accents can be unfamiliar and even hard to understand but for some reason they are never funny like Strine, just different. Not sure why that is.

Alcohol mainly...

I'm from Boston, and sometimes when I hear an Australian accent, I think it's reminiscent of a Bostonian's in some ways.

Rake doesn't have the subtle wit of class Britcoms like Keeping Up Appearances or Are You Being Served?, not to mention the Cowardian repartee of The Benny Hill Show, but I found it quite amusing and sexy (the lead hunk was very generous with nudity). The last season, however, jumped the shark (like many shows).

Omg.

Look, r79, I know Americans get a hard-on for all things Irish, particularly the famine, but get the story right.

This is what you said:

"when a Turkish sultan tried to send help, she talked him down from the £10,000 he had planned to send"

This is a quote from the article:

"when a Turkish sultan tried to send help, she talked him down from the £10,000 he had planned to send"

And didn't you people have slaves at the time? Have you paid reparations?

*correction

"We do have documentation that the Sultan of Turkey, who was himself a very young man at the time, offered to give £10,000 but in Constantinople, the British embassy went to his people to say that it would offend royal protocol so he reduced his donation"