Home: Forum: Old messages: Continued --- The roots of Australian accents

Continued --- The roots of Australian accents

Frances   Sunday, June 12, 2005, 23:55 GMT

Search this site Home: Forum: Old messages: The roots of Australian accents The roots of Australian accents Jonas Sunday, June 12, 2005, 18:22 GMT Paul Sunday, June 12, 2005, 14:10 GMT the truth is the thickest accent in england is the black country accent, and there are many difrent varieties of black country depending which shire you border with its from some parts of the west midlands, and the some of the town on the south staffordshire border like wolverhampton cannock and parts of walsall it sounds slow and sing songy and I think this is the true accent that austrailien english comes from, the accent is dying out though because people who speak more mainstream accents they think your rough or slow or thick. but if everyone in the same land spoke that way ther would be no predudice now would they. some things when people have this accent is that they city really slow and nasally say citay with an old fashioned austrailien like tone, , theres lots of aye yas yo ayam ya kinda thing and again when your here the word "yeah" in that accents its just the same as the ozzy. the accent id very singy and twangy. I forgive you all for not knowing about it cause its not like theyre gonna advertise england on tv with the "yam yams", the funny thing is when the the crooks from this part of the land came to austrailia they cant exactly call the black country, I wonder what the indigenous folk might say, and they war gonna call it the white country neither, another funny thing is if you listen to black country slang for "I was trailed here" oz trail eya nowadays people from this part of england would say ars trayled'eya or oztrailedeya but I suspect years ago before the accent got washed out because of prejudice they spoke in the present sense of oz "trail eya, and that must be the meaning of the modern term austrailia which begs the question if you look at it, did the upperclasses english see the black country yam yams as a threat to the language as a whole and tried many attempts to dampen the way they speak or maybe they just thaught up a load of crimes to rid england of its yam yams ideally by boat to some far away land, cause most was poor and were robing and commiting crimes anyway it was easy to find a reason to deport them, it might be intresteing to know that the black country accent itself derives from the anglo saxons and the gypsies, most villages in the area between wolverhampton and walsall started out as gypsy settlements, my village included "cheslyn hay". for you ozzies Now theres no reason to have a negative idea of comming from the english, now you realise we all aye the same. Paul x __________________________________ Adam Sunday, June 12, 2005, 15:20 GMT It was nothing to do with language. Australia was a British penal colony, and some criminals (or even petty criminals) were sentenced to transportation to Australia for a certain amount of time, sometimes for live. Australians nowadays live in the world's largest open air ex-prison, and you are all descended from criminals. ___________________________________ Adam Sunday, June 12, 2005, 15:22 GMT I've just found this on another forum, posted by someone also called Paul. I don't know if it's you, though. From http://www.news.com.au/story/0,10117,12040592-13762,00.html A chance discovery of tapes in a university storehouse has opened the door for a pair of academics studying the origins and evolution of the Australian accent. Linguists Felicity Cox and Sallyanne Palethorpe from Sydney's Macquarie University, at the outset of a long-term study they have called the Australian Ancestors Project, had no funding and were just "waiting for data when we happened upon these tapes", Dr Cox said yesterday. Five men born in the late 1800s and recorded talking in the 1960s gave the researchers what they needed - a historical context. And they came with a surprise. "We expected these old-timers to sound quite broad," Dr Cox said. "They were rural, working class and not well-educated." Still carrying the effects of dialects from England, the men had rounder vowels than expected. Dr Cox believes the classic broad Australian accent had its origin much later than thought, perhaps during World War I. Over time, the placement of the tongue has given different vowel sounds. "One of the vowels we know has been changing a lot recently is 'O' as in 'no'. These old guys say "ah-oh" but today our boys born in the 1980s, their 'O' is different. "It starts at 'O' (as in sock) and goes over to the 'OO' as in 'you'." Go to any pub in Australia and you'll hear young people ask for a beer. The old ones will ask for a be-ah. And the accent would go on evolving as vowels shifted and took one another's places, Dr Cox said. The three categories Australian linguists work with - broad (think Paul Hogan, or maybe Bob Hawke), general (John Howard) and cultured (Bob Menzies) - were not enough to describe the ever-changing accent, Dr Cox said. quasimodo Sunday, June 12, 2005, 18:29 GMT miss universe 2004 was australian. she was hot * Sunday, June 12, 2005, 18:33 GMT How come the winner of the Miss Universe pageant is always an earthling? That's discrimination! Kirk Sunday, June 12, 2005, 20:00 GMT <<another funny thing is if you listen to black country slang for "I was trailed here" oz trail eya nowadays people from this part of england would say ars trayled'eya or oztrailedeya but I suspect years ago before the accent got washed out because of prejudice they spoke in the present sense of oz "trail eya, and that must be the meaning of the modern term austrailia>> Not at all. "Australia" has its etymology in the Latin word "australis," also giving English the word "austral," meaning "of the south." miss venus Sunday, June 12, 2005, 20:01 GMT you're right * Subscribe to get an e-mail when we publish a new update. Check out our terrific pronunciation software. ---------------- "Australia was a British penal colony, and some criminals (or even petty criminals) were sentenced to transportation to Australia for a certain amount of time, sometimes for live. Australians nowadays live in the world's largest open air ex-prison, and you are all descended from criminals." Adam, You forgot the millions of migrants that came to Australia from mid-1800's to now not of convict stock. Me thinks you are a bit jealous, considering us "ex-convicts" now live in a diverse and relatively rich land, and that 39% of the world's Uranium stocks is currently sitting in a plot in my home state of South Australia. Time to make some money off the old mother country :)