Daily Dose of English 122
The Australian Accent
Daily Dose of English 122
Intermediate
Hi, everyone. My name is Ben and you're listening to a Daily Dose of English. This is a short, simple podcast that you can listen to every day to improve your English. You can find the transcripts for all episodes and more on benslanguagelab.com. I'm glad you could make it today. In this episode, we're going to be talking about Australian English or the Australian accent, which I just had a very bad version of at the beginning there. uh it was not amazing i will promise you that it but i think i got some of the most um i guess dominant aspects of the accent And that's what I'm better at is like noticing the things that are more obvious about an accent and being able to do those, but definitely don't think that that was a good version of an Australian accent. But I want to talk a little bit about it today and maybe learn some of why it's different and what the differences are with you today. So hopefully you can maybe understand it a little bit better and appreciate it a bit more as well. So, the Australian accent is mostly found in Australia, obviously, but there are plenty of speakers that have moved abroad, right? There's lots of Australian people who you might meet in other parts of the world, but most of them are down under. Down under, by the way, is a way to say Australia, because it's thought of as like down at the bottom of the world, right? Because if you look at a regular Mercator projection map, the southern hemisphere is below and Australia is way down at the bottom right. And there it is. And so Australian English, or English has been spoken in Australia for quite a long time. And so it's had a good amount of time to diverge from British English. And it's actually also different from New Zealand English, which is on an island close to Australia, which is in a similar... They're very similar in lots of ways, but they're pretty clearly different and distinct. And so I guess we might as well talk about some things about specific to the accent. And we're primarily gonna focus on vowels because that's mostly what changes. I think I mentioned this in the last episode, but vowels are far and away the more important thing in pretty much all English dialects. There are some small consonant changes, but for the most part, vowels are what distinguish different English accents. And so there's different kinds of mergers, just vowels changing. And so, for example, there's a weak vowel merger in Australian English. Sorry, there's a lot of noise happening here. I hope that you don't, you can't hear that, but so, okay, sorry. There's a weak vowel merger, and that's where the unstressed sounds all become uh, pretty much. There are some small cases, but pretty much everything becomes the same thing, right? So the example here is that Rosas, Roses, which I might say differently, Rosas, Roses, so the Roses of Rosa, the person named Rosa, would become something like Roses, Roses. They just get completely connected. Sorry, not connected. Ah, merged, that's the word. And for example, words like abbot and rabbit, it's completely rhyming. Diggot and bigot is another example here. Because I would say diggot and bigot in my accent, B-I-G-O-T, by the way. But everything becoming uh is pretty common. And then in New Zealand English, which I don't think I'll talk about, There's even the stereotype of is in every case becoming uh. And so instead of saying fish, they might say fush. Fush and chups instead of fish and chips. Whereas in Australian English, I think it only happens in weak syllables. So in this case of dig-get, it would become dig-ut, dig-ut, or whatever it might be. I'm not gonna be doing an amazing job at doing the accent, but I'm here to talk about it a bit more. Another really obvious one is in the sound, like the A sounds in some diphthongs, is in words like face and bait would probably come out as a face and bite, with more of an I sound, face and bite, where you hear the traditional good I might, instead of good A mate, or good day mate, it becomes good I might, face. There's also lowering of some things like in price and bite, instead of price and bite. Choi, oi, becomes, kind of stays pretty similar, I think. Choice, boy, oil, oil. Let's see, what else on here? Oh, obviously it's on, it's non-rhotic, so the R's are not pronounced at the end of a word. Beard and here are all pronounced without sort of an R sound, sort of near, beer and hered. No, near, beard and here. And so we lose that, or they, I guess, I'm not Australian. They lose that. Oh, I just noticed I have two cats in here with me recording. I didn't see either of them when I started and I just looked down and two cats were looking up at me. Sorry, this is a distraction-filled episode. Um, but you can also hear it very obviously in words that get really elongated. So beer might become B essentially, um, going out for a B. Uh, it just gets really long there. That also happens in, um, other R ending words, um, north, uh, north, false, things like that. And the, it's, that's another, I mean, that's pretty clear, pretty. characteristic, yeah that's a word, that's pretty characteristic of many different English accents, of like the English language, but to my ears as an erotic speaker it's pretty obvious, right? It also happens in example words like square and head, which I don't know what that word is, that's on the example here. Head and square become very high eh sounds instead of air. The other things that are on this list are like the eh sound becomes a little bit higher to eh, eh, eh, eh, dress, dress, but I don't even know how accurate that is. But yeah, those are the main vowel differences that I'm looking at here. There's a lot of rising thing, like, I don't know, it's not that special in terms of English phonology, but there are some pretty characteristic things that you might notice. Like I mentioned with, especially with the A sound becoming I, feis, I think is the biggest thing to focus on. There's, Not really any other, like, consonant things to mention, I don't think. It does mention that the, the uh-rah sound is pretty common, just like in American English, right? Lat-uh, lat-er, um, lat-uh, instead of lat-er. Um, right-ed becomes right and right-ed. So right-ed and right-ed become the same pronunciation. Right-ed and right-ed, just like I would do, but that's the same thing here. There's also a note here about yod dropping, which is the words like soot and new, not being pronounced as soot and new, which is a thing in only some places, usually in, I think in England specifically, they still say those things, but for the most part, we've dropped the yod in American English and apparently, um a lot of oh not not all of australian english it says that after t and d and n it's still they still might say it so they would say new or um tube but they wouldn't say a suit they would say suit or loot because loot is another one that might have the loot after it um or zeus uh the god would become a zeus Enthusiasm is also an example here. Enthusiasm might be an Australian pronunciation, but enthusiasm might be a more British pronunciation with that U. Scrolling down the page here, there's also a bunch of different pronunciations. So, for example, things like vitamin would be pronounced vitamin, vitamin, vitamin, vitamin, rather, sorry. And it looks like apparently migraine is pronounced megrine. Megrine? I have to ask about that. Really? I've never heard that before. That's crazy. That's what it says here on Wikipedia at least. It says migraine is pronounced megrine. Oh no, I think I have heard that. Megrine. No, no, that's weird. And privacy would be privacy. Privacy. And so it looks like there's definitely some changes there. There's a note here about some words like dynasty and patronize, dynasty and patronize being pronounced like Britain, rather than what we would say in the US of dynasty patronize, like I said. Let's see, any other interesting bits in here? Oh, there's definitely some other little changes, right? The S-I-A prefix, which is in words like Malaysia, Indonesia, Polynesia, they would pronounce as Zia, Malaysia, Indonesia, Polynesia, right? Things like that. There's also plenty of more British pronunciations, but that's, oh, I'm actually over time now. That's pretty much everything that I have to mention on the Australian accent. Once you get over some of the big sounds and then learn the slang, obviously, the slang is the biggest thing. I can't believe I didn't talk about the slang. What am I doing in this? To be fair, I did title this the Australian accent, but yeah, once you learn the slang and get used to the sound changes, it's really a very easy English dialect to understand. The fun thing is when you get into like the really heavy like Australian slang, which is again not super common unless you're from Australia, but you can definitely find it. If you want some good Australian speaking content, I definitely recommend the YouTube channel Dankpods, D-A-N-K-P-O-D-S. He is Australian and makes very good music-based comedy videos that I think a lot of people can enjoy just because of his sheer enthusiasm. Sorry, what was it? Enthusiasm. No, no, it isn't enthusiasm. His sheer enthusiasm for what he does so definitely a recommendation on Australian content But there's plenty of stuff out there go look for it enjoy it, but that's all that I have for this episode Thank you so much for listening. I hope that you enjoyed and I'll see you again tomorrow for another episode. Bye.
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