Sure, you'll notice changes to your own accent after moving to Australia. Sometimes these changes are subtle, but it's generally best to start learning the Aussie twang early on. This will help you embrace it before the accent is too far ingrained in your everyday speech.
Even experienced American and British actors have difficulty imitating an Australian accent with complete accuracy. That said, with enough practice, you can speak with an Australian accent. The key is to listen to the Australian way of speaking and mimic oral positions, tone, and pronunciations.
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.
You Won't Get An Aussie Accent, But You Will Pick Up Heaps Of Slang. Sorry to break it to ya, but you most likely won't pick up a beautiful Australian accent if you move here. Ugh. But you will pick up a bunch of words that'll make your friends at home think you're Australian (or weird, whatever).
Australian English is most similar to British English in spelling and sentence construction, although its accent and vocabulary are very distinct from the UK.
Strine, also spelled Stryne /ˈstraɪn/, describes a broad accent of Australian English.
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.
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.
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.
Australian English is a non-rhotic dialect. The Australian accent is most similar to that of New Zealand and is also similar to accents from the South-East of Britain, particularly those of Cockney and Received Pronunciation. As with most dialects of English, it is distinguished primarily by its vowel phonology.
G'day (guh-day) / Hello.
There are still some differences in the Aussie accent between states and between city and country, but the broader Australian accents seem to be disappearing and becoming more homogenized. An Australian accent is still quite distinctive and discernible when heard overseas away from Australia.
What does it mean? Another word for friend. Common in Britain as well, but used even more enthusiastically by Aussies, who pepper the ends of their sentences with a longer, stretched out “maaaaate” that conveys friendliness and establishes a relaxed bond between the speakers.
According to a recent survey conducted by the popular dating website MissTravel.com, over 2000 American men and women regard Australian accents as one of the sexiest in the world.
General Australian English is the most common of Australian accents. It is especially prominent in urban Australia and is used as a standard language for Australian films, television programs and advertising.
While indigenous Australians had developed over 250 different languages at the time of European colonisation, non-indigenous Australians simply haven't been around long enough to develop regional accents. And as an English-speaking immigrant population, it was their common language that bound them together.
But the Australian accents are different from the accents of America, or Canada, or New Zealand because those accents were created from kids growing up in those places with different communities and histories. Accents are all about the people we spend time with when we are young.
Australian English follows British spelling very closely but many common words are spelt differently in American English. Despite being spelt differently, the meaning of the word is the same.
#1 The Australian accent is non-rhotic
This is a key feature that only occasionally has exceptions. Sometimes native speakers will pronounce the /r/ sound at the end of the word if linking two words closely but only if the next word contains a vowel sound at the start.
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).
Some key features of the Australian accent are the schwa, /ə/, the non-rhotic /r/ sound (listen to an Australian say a word with the /r/ sound, and then listen to an American say the same word and you can here the distinct difference in the way that the /r/ phoneme is pronounced and stressed), heavily nasalised vowel ...
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.
Around 50 years after the colony was established, Richards said English people arriving in Australia started to claim that Australians were speaking the "purest English on earth". This discovery period of other ways of speaking and other words for things brought an acute awareness of the language and sound.
Ailsa, who describes the Australian mullet as a "way of life", agrees. "Australians love mullets because we consider ourselves to be larrikins," she says. A larrikin, similar to a ratbag, explains the BBC, means a cheeky rule-breaker in today's society, but in the 1800s meant urban, working-class youths.