Over the course of that first wave of settlers and convicts, their kids made more of that accommodation and by the third generation you've got kids who are all sounding pretty much the same. This is what linguists call 'levelling'. Around the 1820s we have the emergence of something like an Australian-English accent.
According to Richards, the beginning of our Australian accent emerged following the arrival of European settlers in 1788. "It emerged from a process called levelling down because you had all these people who came here on 11 ships from different dialect areas, regional dialect areas across England," he 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.
Aboriginal English is a dialect of Standard Australian English, in the same way as Scottish English and American Englishes and English Englishes all differ from each other. Aboriginal Englishes are the only regionally distributed dialects of Australian English in this country, which is quite unusual for any country.
The Aussie accent started with kids
The Aussie accent, as we know it today, started more than 200 years ago with the children of the convicts, soldiers and other European arrivals. The parents spoke with all different kinds of English accents because they came from many places in England.
Aboriginal languages
It is believed that there were almost 400 Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait languages at the time of first European contact. Most of these are now either extinct or moribund, with only about fifteen languages still being spoken among all age groups of the relevant tribes.
The Australian English accent has been evolving for more than 200 years and its evolution is driven primarily by children. The clipped British tones of old have mostly gone replaced by a language that reflects the diverse and multicultural nature of Australia.
Australian English is most similar to British English in spelling and sentence construction, although its accent and vocabulary are very distinct from the UK.
The distinctive Australian accent is the result of a “drunken slur” caused by the heavy drinking of the early settlers, according to a communication expert from the country. "It's not just about pronunciation; vocal quality or timbre matters, as does intonation – the way the pitch of the voice rises and falls."
There is no one Aboriginal word that all Aborigines use for Australia; however, today they call Australia, ""Australia"" because that is what it is called today. There are more than 250 aboriginal tribes in Australia. Most of them didn't have a word for ""Australia""; they just named places around them.
The majority of Australians speak English as a first or other language, however a significant number of people also speak languages other than English.
The most common verbal greeting is a simple “Hey”, “Hello”, or “Hi”. Some people may use Australian slang and say “G'day” or “G'day mate”. However, this is less common in cities. Many Australians greet by saying “Hey, how are you?”.
A few historians believe that the slight 'drool' or 'slurring' which with Australians speak can be traced back to the fact that so many of the first Englishmen, colonizers, sailors and prisoners were drunk often, and that the children, upon hearing this garbled, mushy type of speaking, picked it up and passed it along.
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.
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”.
(Noun) An uncouth or uncultured person, usually. See also: feral, ratbag, reptile, bevan etc. “I can't understand that bogan's broad Australian accent.”
In its name, Cultivated Australian English does sound like it's posher, educated and the “best” way to speak, but that's not necessarily the case. The cultivated Australian English accent is not a superior way to speak English in Australia. No accent is better than another.
Gubbah, also spelt gubba, is a term used by some Aboriginal people to refer to white people or non-Aboriginal people. The Macquarie Dictionary has it as "n. Colloq. (derog.) an Aboriginal term for a white man".
Besides working as herding animals, Aussies serve as police dogs, narcotics detectors and competitors in obedience trials. They also make great family pets. They are a recent addition to the AKC herding group; some Aussie breeders fear AKC recognition may create undue emphasis on appearance over ability.
There's two types of english speaking accents, rhotic and non-rhotic. One reason the Australian accent is so hard to imitate is because it's a combination of these. An example are the words “can” and “can't”. We say can the rhotic way “caan” and can't the non-rhotic way “cahnt”.
Early European settlers to Australia — many of whom were convicts — were from all over Great Britain and Ireland, and their speech patterns blended to form the new Australian accent.
That's because the Australian accent is non-rhotic, so an "r" isn't pronounced unless it comes before a vowel. The American accent is rhotic, so when a word is spelt with an "r," a "hard r" sound is used.
Australian Prehistory: Humans are thought to have arrived in Australia about 30,000 years ago. The original inhabitants, who have descendants to this day, are known as aborigines. In the eighteenth century, the aboriginal population was about 300,000.
Genetics have nothing at all to do with a person's accent or dialect or the language(s) they speak.
Strine, also spelled Stryne /ˈstraɪn/, describes a broad accent of Australian English.