Australia may be a continent, but, when it comes to the English-Australian accent, it is largely a standard one across the land.
Professor John Hajek, from the University of Melbourne's School of Languages and Linguistics, says it is an unusual case.
"For instance, you can tell when someone's from the south of England, you can tell when someone's from the north of England, you can tell when someone's from Wales, you can tell when someone's from Scotland. But we have a lot of trouble identifying reliably whether someone is from Brisbane or Melbourne or Sydney or Perth."
Why?
Professor Hajek points out, while Indigenous Australians had developed over 250 different languages before European colonisation, Australia is young in terms of white settlement.
"It's limited mainly because we're a young country -- we're only settled a couple of hundred years ago by Europeans, in terms of English -- and the fact that we are incredibly mobile."
Victorian College of the Arts senior voice lecturer Leith McPherson says it easy for an outsider to get that unique Australian accent wrong, though.
"I think one of the things that foreign speakers tend to get wrong about the Australian accent is that they key into the sounds that you'll hear in a cockney (London) accent. There's quite a famous, or infamous, episode of The Simpsons where the characters travel to Australia, and I think pretty much every actor that they chose to play an Australian is doing a fairly terrible cockney accent. ("That's a bloody outrage, that is!") And there's definitely an overlap between those two accents. There are qualities of 'cockney' that are present in the Australian accent. But it's quite distinct. So, if you're doing a word like 'laugh' -- aagh, aagh -- go back to that hesitation sound. It's that 'A' sound that happens in the middle of the mouth, 'laugh.' Whereas, like 'laugh, laugh,' if I'm talking like that, ' laugh,' it's a position that's much more open in the back of the mouth."
Professor Hajek says Australia tried to copy British accents, citing old media recordings like this 1980 one from SBS:
"This is SBS Ethnic Television, coming to you on APN2 in Sydney and APV2 Melbourne ... Good morning, my name is Deepak, and welcome to Ethnic Television."
"If you listen to television and radio recordings from the '50s, '60s and '70s, it's quite striking how British it sounds. But the announcers are all Australian, and it really was a model that we tried to emulate. And so, when you listen to older speakers, particularly of a certain social class, they definitely sound much more British. They're what we call 'cultivated' Australian-English speakers."
But Professor Hajek says those days have passed.
"The broader your accent, you're more likely to have lower education. The more cultivated your accent, the more likely you are to have elevated levels of education, the more likely you are to have wealth. In fact, there's a whole tradition that's now basically disappeared of Australians trying to sound more upper class, more British, by doing speech and elocution lessons. So, my mother's generation, grandmother's generation, spent a lot of time in school learning how to speak 'proper.'"
As for contemporary Australia and its accents, he cites the hugely successful television series Kath and Kim and two characters named Prue and Trude.
"There's the two contrasts. There's the characters Prue and Trude, I think their names are, who've got this upper-class Australian accent. And if you listen to them, you can hear how different they are from Kath and Kim. Kath and Kim really play on the broader Australian accent. So the whole joke of she doesn't say 'nice,' she says 'noice.' So, you know, those sort of vowel changes that we associate with a much broader Australian accent."
Dr Debbie Loakes, also from the School of Languages and Linguistics, has looked at whether Irish and Chinese migrants, for example, are adopting features of Australian-English.
"And it seems so far that people who've been here around 10 years may be adopting certain features. But there's also, potentially, resistance. So, people might not want to sound like the group that they're moving towards, and they might like to keep their own accent. And they might be very conscious of it. And, in that way, we've got those factors of identity being involved in someone maintaining their own accent. In the case of a second language, they're probably more motivated to start sounding like the group that they actually arrived to. It depends on where the people are from -- if it's a second dialect, a second language, whether they believe their accent's prestigious in the first place."
There is also an element of cross-cultural influence.
Dr Loakes says children are especially influenced by the way others speak, and that can include their migrant parents.
"Linguists call that an ethnolect. So, when it's either the first or the second generation of people. For example, with Lebanese parents, or, in Melbourne, it might be Greek or Italian, they might have a different accent, which may be from features that their parents had in their first language that have translated to their English. and so it's likely that, especially in a high school, if there's a large proportion of kids who are, say, from a Lebanese or Greek background, it's likely that they might be the prestigious group in that school and then mainstream kids might take on some of the features from their accents because they like it. So there is that whole idea of accents being either prestigious or someone looking towards somebody else and then being more likely to imitate them."
Professor Hajek says regions, however, are just beginning to show their own identities.
"So there is evidence that we're getting Melbourne starting to show itself to be distinctive, and it's because of one vowel. And even the way we say the city name has changed, so that many people in Melbourne refer to it as 'MAEL-bun.' So they open the vowel. And that's what outsiders often identify as characteristics of Melbourne speech. But, in fact, when we start looking, we're starting to find the same thing in Brisbane now. so things are changing. Because of the movement, because of the mass media and all of those sorts of things, things change very quickly."
