![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Ramblings on Australian accents
Sep. 29th, 2010 02:49 pmThis post is a crosspost from Jayeless, and can be read in its original location here.
One of the downsides to studying linguistics, if you’re anything like me, is that you start listening very closely to the way other people speak. Of course, if you’re anything like me you wouldn’t consider this a downside, you’d consider this pure awesomeness. Just think, every time you get super-bored in international studies, you can just listen to your classmates and think, “Oh wow, did they just do the whole Melbourne Accent™ thing and pronounce an [e] like /æ/?” or, “Hey, so I’m not the only one who substitutes glottal stops for [t]s! Awesome!”
As you can see my classes are very exciting.
Anyway, someone I know said I should write a post about Australian accents, and since I adore accents, I thought I would. Actually what he said was I should talk about the homogeneity of Australian accents, but I feel like this is a bit unfair.
Of course Australian accents are far more homogeneous than, say, British accents, or even North American accents. There’s not really any such thing as a “New South Welsh accent”, for instance, although I was once reading a Lost fan wiki that claimed there was. That kind of misinformation should be on Mythbusters, man — there’s truly not. While there are multiple Australian accents, none of them are tied down to specific regions of the country (possibly excluding the country/city divide). That said, there are different accents, and (in General Australian anyway) further variations on top of those accents.
( Read the rest of this entry » )
