Perhaps the most significant influencers on Australian English is that of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander languages.
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.
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.
The traditional Aboriginal languages have no 'h' sound. Over the generations, Aboriginal speakers have learnt English with an Aboriginal accent. So when they have learnt standard English words which start with an 'h' sound, the Aboriginal accent has produced such words without this 'h' sound.
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 often contains higher levels of nasal resonance to oral resonance. Resonance refers to voice acoustics and is determined by where the bulk of sound vibration from the voice is reinforced in the your face.
Australian English is most similar to British English in spelling and sentence construction, although its accent and vocabulary are very distinct from the UK.
The islands were settled by different seafaring Melanesian cultures such as the Torres Strait Islanders over 2500 years ago, and cultural interactions continued via this route with the Aboriginal people of northeast Australia.
Gubbah, also spelt gubba, is a term used by some Aboriginal people to refer to white people or non-Aboriginal people. The Macquarie Dictionary has it as "n. Colloq. (derog.) an Aboriginal term for a white man".
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.
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.
Three main varieties of Australian English are spoken according to linguists: broad, general and cultivated. They are part of a continuum, reflecting variations in accent. They can, but do not always, reflect the social class, education and urban or rural background of the speaker.
Aboriginal origins
Humans are thought to have migrated to Northern Australia from Asia using primitive boats. A current theory holds that those early migrants themselves came out of Africa about 70,000 years ago, which would make Aboriginal Australians the oldest population of humans living outside Africa.
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island languages
Over 250 Australian Aboriginal languages are thought to have existed at the time of first European contact.
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.
Pap(a) is also found as 'mother', mainly in Victoria. Other kinship roots (for grandparents) have been shown to have a split distribution with one root dominating in the east and one in the west for what is apparently a single proto-meaning.
There is no one Aboriginal word that all Aborigines use for Australia; however, today they call Australia, ""Australia"" because that is what it is called today. There are more than 250 aboriginal tribes in Australia. Most of them didn't have a word for ""Australia""; they just named places around them.
Aboriginal people refer to an Elder as 'Aunty' or 'Uncle'. However, it is recommended that non-Aboriginal people check the appropriateness of their use of these terms as referring to an Elder or leader as Aunty or Uncle may not be appropriate for an outsider unless a strong relationship has been established.
Aboriginal Australians became genetically isolated 58,000 years ago, tens of thousands of years before other ancestral groups, making them the world's oldest civilization.
Aboriginal peoples
Genetic studies appear to support an arrival date of 50–70,000 years ago. The earliest anatomically modern human remains found in Australia (and outside of Africa) are those of Mungo Man; they have been dated at 42,000 years old.
Based on the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) projections, the number of Indigenous Australians in 2021 was estimated to be 881,600.
Strine, also spelled Stryne /ˈstraɪn/, describes a broad accent of Australian English.
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.