Australian English

[pynkbyrd]

Can anyone suggest a book about the history of how the Australian accent developed, that's not too linguistically technical? Is there such a thing

Comments

[tabouli]

Heh. Well, one of the non-technical theories I've read is that the Australia accent came from a mixture of the accents of poor Irish and Cockney convicts combined with the flattening and nasalising of sounds due to people screwing up their face in the sun and opening their mouths as little as possible to keep out the flies.

[fenoxielo524]

That's pretty funny but remotely plausible in a that's-sort-of-what-you-do kind of way. :D

[nimuroji]

Thankyou. Someone in our defence! The Australian Macquirie dictionary has a whole chapter in its preface about the Australian accent and Australian english which I could probably quite some of; however the wikipedia article looks fairly good.

[mobiletash]

Perhaps if you are actually serious about learning about the Australian accent, you could try learning a couple of the Native Australian Languages that have existed and some that still exist and are in use. You could probably learn a lot about different constonants and how certain sounds get carried over from one language to another. Also perhaps since there are a large number of migrants in Australia, you could also try to find something to read about migrants learning English and what particular sounds are most difficult for them.
Personally I'd love to have a book on how people from Manchester and regional parts of Britain view vowels. I'm still trying to work out what some of the things my ex-college was actually talking about were. He didn't even have a second language!!

[fishinista]

Aboriginal languages have little to no influence on typical Australian english, and are pretty useless if you're looking for insight.

[mobiletash]

Oh, I had no idea that Aboriginal indegenous people of Australia were so segregated from people that spoke typical Australian English. After all if there was no, or at least not a severe segregation you would think that a majority of people who came from a bi-lingual family would carry over some traits into their spoken language.
What indigenous languages are you most familiar with?

[fishinista]

Most aboriginal languages have pretty much died out entirely, and the ones that remain aren't very widely spoken at all. A lot of Aboriginal languages are down to their last few speakers. Also, there is huge regional variation in the languages, which makes any language preservation effort difficult.

The thing is that there were probably far too many varied languages to make any huge impact on english. A few aboriginal words have made their way into the lexicon, but the Australian accent is way too homogenous to suggest that the huge amount of languages affected it.