12.1 Australian pronunciation
Description
This article is from the soc.culture.australian FAQ, by Stephen Wales with numerous contributions by others.
12.1 Australian pronunciation
* Pronounciation of Aussie [WE]
Information concerning how/why Australians pronounce Aussie with an
/z/ and Americans pronounce it with a /s/. A linguistic analysis (I'm
a linguist) suggests the following:
1. The Australian pronunciation of Aussie (/z/) is a normal
phonological feature called "intervocalic voicing of consonants" where
English speakers make /s/ -> /z/, /k/ -> /g/, /t/ -> /d/ etc. when
they are between consonants. Some Americans pronounce "significant"
as significant, water as wader and we all say "laser" with a /z/.
2. The American pronunciation of Aussie (/s/) is an example of
spelling pronunciation -- which, once again is normal behaviour when
we don't know the pronunciation of a word. We usually say it the way
it spells until we find out differently.
3. So why do Americans insist on saying Aussie with an /s/ even when
we tell them Aussies say it with a /z/? Once again, that's normal.
We all have great difficulty saying things in a way that goes against
the grain -- our grain. I've lived a long time in the U.S., but still
can't say NEW York with /nu/. I have to say /niu/. Most Americans
say greasy (/s/) or blouse (/s/) -- all with /s/'s. I think it may go
against the grain for them to say Aussie with a /z/.
* To distinguish Australian accents from various British ones: [RC]
Australian "day" sounds like "die";
Australian "buy" sounds like "boy".
So that "daylight" ends up something like "die-loyt". For more
details see Afferbeck Lauder's, "Let Stalk Strine".
Actually I've heard people distinguish three different Australian
accents: Cultivated, General and Broad. In the "broad" variant the
vowel shifts are particularly obvious, but I speak "cultivated" and
have been mistaken for English by Englishmen several times.
[PW] Some pommy accents are quite similar to strine. In particular,
some of the south-coast ports are quite similar - probably because of
historical reasons ! There seem to be fundamental differences between
the northern and southern english accents. The australian accent
seems to have picked up a mixture of the pronunciations such that
people here sometimes think that I'm really posh because of the way I
pronounce some words.
[MJ] It is said the accent spoken in Milton Keynes (a 'new' city
consisting largely of housing estates) in England (especially
among young people) is quite Australian, apparently due to their
watching Neighbours and Home and Away.
The variation in ozzie accents seems to be more to do with the scale
of the changes in pronunciation rather that the actual changes. For
example, country accents always seem "stronger" that city ones, but
seem to have the same way of pronouncing words. This seems to hold
true for all but the most posh people, but they live in world of their
own anyway.
[TG]
There are many theories about the evolution of the Australian accent.
There would appear to be influences from cockney pronunciation, and
there are also vestiges of Irish influences as well (a lot of early
teachers were of Irish background, particularly in church run
schools.) You will also find remnants of Irish, Scottish and Welsh
influences in the Australian pronunciation of some words. Then, of
course, we had a large influx of German, Greek and Italian
immigration, which has probably also had an influence as well. Of
later years, the language has been strongly influenced by TV media,
from, you guessed it, the USA. To say that the convicts are the
predominating influence is probably false. There were many more free
settlers than there ever were convicts.
One common comparison that is made is between the Received
Pronunciation (RP) (a la BBC English) and what is termed Cultivated
Australian (CA). There is also a classification of Australian speech
called General Australian (GA). GA differs from CA in that vowels
tend to become a little longer and some vowels are "diphthongized"
(hard to explain if you don't know phonetics -- maybe someone else
could have a bash at this one?) CA is more likely to be found in
formal speech and GA in conversational. There tends to be a slight
erm, what you might call a "class distinction" between the two,
although this is by no means a general thing. (Often politicians
cultivate a GA manner of speaking to be more appealing to the voting
population, as GA is more laid back, you might say.) I might also
point out that the Australian accent was the but of much disdain for
some time earlier this century -- speech trainers would teach the
"proper speech" i.e. RP.
In general, CA speakers tend to form their vowels more forward in the
mouth than is the case for RP. This is why RP pronunciation is often
associated with the phrase "plum in the mouth" because the vowels tend
to be formed further back in the mouth. To an CA speaker, this is
probably the most noticeable characteristic. RP speakers also tend to
have a more rounded lip formation than CA speakers for the same
sounds. (Now that's a big generalisation!)
Another difference is the way in which words and phrases are
pronounced in isolation and in connected speech. CA speakers tend to
use what is called the neutral vowel more often than RP speakers do in
connected speech. Also CA speakers tend to have a slightly smaller
intonation range than RP speakers. This lead to several criticisms of
CA speech as "monotonous" by many speech trainers earlier this
century. There are other traits of RP pronunciation that are not
present in CA, such as frequent use of a definite vowel in the final
position. These differences wrt neutral vowel and intonation patterns
are also why many Australians label someone speaking with an RP accent
as excessively pedantic.
These are some of the characteristics compared to RP, now of course
there are many dialectic variations of English in Britain! RP is just
used as a useful reference point. Also, any given speaker is not
necessarily going to use a "pure" dialect either, you'll find CA
speakers using GA pronunciations and all sorts of variations in the
middle.
One book you might like to look at is Mitchell and Delbridge
"Phonetics of English in Australia".
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