The study design asks students to familiarise themselves with features of Broad, General and Cultivated accents in Australian English, but you should also research a few of the many unique ethnolect accents present in Australia. The article below discusses the origins and cultural significance of our Aussie accents.
Sydney Morning Herald: Broad or posh, we still sound uniquely Australian. Where did our accent come from?
Useful quotes from the article:
'All dialects reflect Australian identity but, in addition, reveal the cultural affiliation of the speaker.' - Felicity Cox, professor in linguistics at Macquarie University
'There have been some substantial changes in the last 20 years to Australian English – but it is also true that all languages change, and that’s one of the main things you can rely on with language.' - Debbie Loakes, postdoctoral fellow in languages and linguistics at the University of Melbourne
'There’s nothing inherently correct or incorrect about language – it’s all about the use to which it is put in its community.' - Felicity Cox, professor in linguistics at Macquarie University
'The accent in which … words are spoken is an essential part of their meaning.' - Linguist and author, Bruce Moore
'We all tend to deliberately change our accent depending on circumstance and company.' - Sarah Loebegeiger de Rodriguez, opera singer and speech therapist
'Our perception of accent... is political – and effort is needed on the part of listeners as well as speakers to achieve an equitable outcome.' - Sarah Loebegeiger de Rodriguez, opera singer and speech therapist
'There are two different kinds of accent... the “foreign” iteration where “a person speaks one language using some of the rules or sounds of another one”; and the local one, “the way a group of people speak their native language, [which] is determined by where they live and what social groups they belong to."' - Linguistic Society of America
'The vast majority of Australians... tend to speak a version of general Australian English with only minor regional variations.'
'Where once upon a time these variations might have been seen as failings to speak standard English, they are increasingly celebrated by socio-linguists as part of the rich tapestry of modern English in Australia.'
'[The broad accent] served as a marker of both class (lower) and location (generally regional). These days, it mostly survives only as a geographical marker. Outside of places such as “Brahton” (aka the Melbourne bayside suburb of Brighton, stomping ground of Prue and Trude from the TV comedy Kath and Kim), the cultivated accent has also largely disappeared. “That suggests to me that the old conflict with Britain has been almost completely resolved in Australian society,” observes Moore.'
'Despite the drift towards homogeneity, linguists have also begun to embrace the idea that Australian English encompasses not just broad, general and cultivated forms – collectively referred to as “mainstream” Australian English – but also Aboriginal and ethnocultural accents .'
'The Australian English accent has come in and out of favour – we certainly haven’t always been happy to sound Aussie. From the end of the 19th century until the 1960s, there was a push in Australian education towards a standard accent, based on the RP (received pronunciation) taught in the British public school system. Implicit in that was the idea that there is a correct way of speaking, and that anything non-standard was a degraded form.'
'The notion of a standard to which we should all aspire has fallen from favour as part of a general shift away from judging the way people speak to simply recording it.'
'Although the trend is towards a homogenised general accent, linguists are increasingly looking to codify the wide variety of other accents found in modern Australian English. “There are changes occurring now, really over the last 10 to 20 years, where sub-dialects and sociolects are strongly established,” says McCrossin-Owen. “For example, first-, second- and even third-generation European accents such as Greek, Lebanese, Turkish and Italian all have their own sub-dialects.”'
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