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.
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.
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.
There were, of course, many other native tongues – at least 250, by recent estimates – spoken by First Nations people long before white settlers arrived, and some of their words – kangaroo, galah and goanna, to name a few – found their way into Australian English, although Aboriginal languages appear to have had little ...
This is what linguists call 'levelling'. Around the 1820s we have the emergence of something like an Australian-English accent. It probably would have been more English than our accent now but it has continued to evolve.
The Australian accent is famous for its vowel sounds, absence of a strong “r” pronunciation and the use of an inflection – or intonation – at the end of sentences, which can make statements sound like questions. According to Felicity, the way vowels are pronounced is the most peculiar feature of Australian English.
Australia was colonised two centuries later, which explains why the accent of Australian English is more similar to British English compared to American English. However, American English became very popular in Australia later in history, which affected their pronunciation.
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.
The New Zealand accent is most similar to Australian accents (particularly those of Victoria, Tasmania, New South Wales and South Australia) but is distinguished from these accents by the presence of three "clipped" vowels, slightly resembling South African English.
1788: The Australian accent, at least according to modern experts, began developing right after the arrival of European settlers and convicts.
It is widely believed that the word pom is short for pomegranate, which Australians and New Zealanders used as rhyming slang for the word immigrant during the 20th century.
“Our forefathers regularly got drunk together and through their frequent interactions unknowingly added an alcoholic slur to our national speech patterns,” wrote Frenkel in The (Melbourne) Age.
The harsh environment in which convicts and new settlers found themselves meant that men and women closely relied on each other for all sorts of help. In Australia, a 'mate' is more than just a friend and is a term that implies a sense of shared experience, mutual respect and unconditional assistance.
Before Europeans arrived in Australia, there were up to 300 different Aboriginal languages and around 700 different dialects. Many of these languages are no longer used or are under threat of disappearing. There are now only 20–50 Indigenous languages that are 'healthy', meaning they are spoken to and used by children.
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”.
The Australian accent, as we know it today, first began when European settlers landed in Australia in 1788. There are various theories as to how the accent became so distinctive, but the prevailing theory is that the settlers had too many varied accents. They needed to pair them all down in order to communicate.
As the oldest English dialect still spoken, Geordie normally refers to both the people and dialect of Newcastle-Upon-Tyne in Northeast England.
At first, English speakers in the colonies and England used a rhotic accent. But after the Revolutionary War, upper-class and upper-middle-class citizens in England began using non-rhotic speech as a way to show their social status.
Although Australians and Kiwis might sound comparatively similar to the untrained ear, research has shown there is a distinct contrast in the pronunciation of vowels. Australians tend to pronounce their vowels with more emphasis on the sound [ee], whereas New Zealanders make more prominent [u] sounds.
Article Talk. Strine, also spelled Stryne /ˈstraɪn/, describes a broad accent of Australian English.
The Australian accent is pretty close to London English, though apparently there was a Midlands influence too.
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).
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.