The English As She Is Spoken
Chinglish is one thing, but Americans travelling to the U.K., Australia, Ireland, or other English-speaking countries often find that they can’t make any sense of the local accents. Heck, sometimes just travelling around the U.S. you can’t understand what some people are saying.
This website at George Mason University has a collection of almost 300 audio samples of various regional accents of the English language from all over the world. When you hear someone from, say, Davenport, Iowa and compare it to someone from Cape Town, South Africa you can really tell the difference, but there are also distinct regional differences within England, Ireland, and Australia that Americans may not quite appreciate. In England, for example, the Birmingham accent (called “Brummie” by the English) is still regarded as the sign of a person who is not too bright. When we went to Montreal early this summer, I managed to insult a group of elderly tourists fron New Zealand for failing to distinguish their accent from an Australian accent, but the Australian accent differs from east to west and from north to south.
Well, I had fun listening to many of them and trying to see if I could mimic them. Then, when you get tired of the English variations, you can also check out the several dozen other languages they have catalogued from Afrikaans to Zulu.
October 5th, 2008 at 7:21 pm
Actually there are not really significant regional accents in Australia - definitely nowhere near the regional variations of even the USA or Canada, and the vast majority even of Australians (who should be able to discriminate, if anyone can) who think they can tell where someone comes from their accent are invariably wrong. What you might be hearing as differences could be easily heard within the one city or town, and even between friends in a single social group. There are bigger differences along class and educational lines, and in the words people choose - and even then there is only a handful of them. The main marker that people cite is /ae/ vs /a:/ but even then it is very mixed. There is a partial salary-celery merger amongst some people in Melbourne, a bit of a difference in pool-pull in some places, but even the celebrated ‘broadness continuum’ is breaking down.
More in a second comment.
October 5th, 2008 at 7:42 pm
Generally, people do tend to be more likely to speak with a broader Australian accent the further north you get, and the further away from the coast that you go, but as I said before there are large, strong class/occupational/educational/personal factors which easily trump regional factors, so that we all do really sound very similar. We really need a new very large study of Australian English, both in how we pronounce and how we perceive. Changes have been documented over the last few decades (I was at a conference the other week where some of these were presented - fascinating!) but really Australian English is such a (linguistically) young variety amongst a very mobile population that there are few regional differences that can’t be accounted for by other influences.