General Australian English is the most common of Australian accents. It is especially prominent in urban Australia and is used as a standard language for Australian films, television programs and advertising.
According to linguists, there are three main kinds of Aussie accent: broad (think former Prime Minister Bob Hawke), general (closer to Kevin Rudd) and cultivated (like Malcolm Fraser).
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.
Article Talk. Strine, also spelled Stryne /ˈstraɪn/, describes a broad accent of Australian English.
Three main varieties of Australian English are spoken according to linguists: broad, general and cultivated. They are part of a continuum, reflecting variations in accent. They can, but do not always, reflect the social class, education and urban or rural background of the speaker.
The results revealed that women and men find different accents attractive, and the only common accents on both lists were Australian and Southern. While men desired Israeli and Colombian accents the most, this was not mirrored amongst the women who were surveyed, who ultimately preferred British and Spanish accents.
Generally speaking though, it can be said that the Welsh accent is probably closest to an Australian one. This is due to their similarities in terms of pronunciation and vocabulary choices – both Welsh and Australians tend to end words on a 'v' sound rather than an 'r' sound like other English speakers do.
While indigenous Australians had developed over 250 different languages at the time of European colonisation, non-indigenous Australians simply haven't been around long enough to develop regional accents. And as an English-speaking immigrant population, it was their common language that bound them together.
For example, “nice” sounds more like “noice.” The broader the accent, the more pronounced the diphthong.
1. G'day. One of the first things you'll hear when in Australia, is the classic “G'day, mate”, which is basically the same as saying, “good day”, or “hello”.
Australian English is most similar to British English in spelling and sentence construction, although its accent and vocabulary are very distinct from the UK.
Australian English arose from a dialectal melting pot created by the intermingling of early settlers who were from a variety of dialectal regions of Great Britain and Ireland, though its most significant influences were the dialects of Southeast England.
While some Australian speakers would pronounce “no” as a diphthong, starting on “oh” as in dog and ending on “oo” as in put, others begin with an unstressed “a” (the sound at the end of the word “sofa”), then move to the “oh” and then “oo”.
Some key features of the Australian accent are the schwa, /ə/, the non-rhotic /r/ sound (listen to an Australian say a word with the /r/ sound, and then listen to an American say the same word and you can here the distinct difference in the way that the /r/ phoneme is pronounced and stressed), heavily nasalised vowel ...
The most widely accepted theory to why Australians have the accent they do is that the first Australian born children (of the colonizers, not the natives obviously) simply created the first trace of the recognizable accent amongst themselves naturally.
Australian English often contains higher levels of nasal resonance to oral resonance. Resonance refers to voice acoustics and is determined by where the bulk of sound vibration from the voice is reinforced in the your face.
“The younger generation are getting rid of the 'yuh' and making it more 'noo',” Ms Hume revealed. “That's a shift that's happening in real time in our accent, which is an influence of US media and their pronunciation of that word.”
Regional variation
In Australia there is not a lot of regionally-based accent variation compared with most other world Englishes, however, there are lots of vocabulary differences. See Macquarie Dictionary's Australian Word Map for some details.
When it comes to sexual attraction, women rate age, education, intelligence, income, trust, and emotion connection higher than men who put a greater priority on attractiveness and physical build says new research from QUT.
British, Australian, and Irish accents are the top 3 foreign accents people find to be most attractive. When it comes to attraction, 80% of people feel that accents make someone more attractive, with 77% saying someone's accent was what attracted them to a person.
The vast majority said long-term attraction is less about physical appearance and more about character - specifically pointing to the values a woman holds and how she treats others. 'You don't need to doll yourself up or have money in my eyes. A lady just has to have a heart and a mind that care,' one man said.
Australian English can be described as a new dialect that developed as a result of contact between people who spoke different, mutually intelligible, varieties of English. The very early form of Australian English would have been first spoken by the children of the colonists born into the early colony in Sydney.