Sydney's National Institue of Dramatic Art (Wikimedia)
I often use Google News to write this blog. Crude source of inspiration it may be, but searching for permutations of “dialect,” “accent,” or “language” gives me a wealth of material to ponder. There is one exception to this, however, and that is when I search for “Australian Accent.”
That query yields the same results again and again:
- Australian actor loses his accent for American TV show
- Australian actress loses her accent for American TV show
- Australian needs to lose accent for American TV show!
- So, Australian actor, what was it like learning an American accent for this new American TV show?
You get the idea. These headlines illustrate a well-known fact: there is an extremely disproportionate number of Australian actors in American television and film. Disproportionate because Australia is a small country (it only recently cracked 20 million), as far from the United States as anywhere on earth, and has an accent nothing like an American dialect.
But let’s face it: Australian actors are really good at accents. If I were an American TV producer I might hire an Australian without worrying whether they had the American accent down. I would just assume they had it mastered, the way I would assume my doctor has a medical degree. It’s a given.
So then, why are Australian actors so good at accents? What is it about this friendly island nation that breeds dialect savants?
Frankly, because Aussie actors have to be at accents. We Americans and Brits can afford to be lazier. As drama students, we have the bulk of contemporary drama at our disposal. If an Aussie actor want to be considered for the greatest roles in English speaking drama, on the other hand, that actors needs to get out of his dialect comfort zone.
This is the theatrical equivalent of why a “Scandinavian monolingual” seems as mythical as a unicorn: if you want to spend your entire life in the greater Copenhaagen area, so be it, but eventually you might want to visit Amsterdam. The more culturally small and isolated a community, the more that culture broadens its linguistic horizons.
This isn’t about geography, it’s about cultural dominence. Living in New York City, I often forget that I am only 5 1/2 hours from a province (Quebec), where the native language is French. But as members of the most widespread culture on earth, we Americans don’t feel an instinctual need to learn other languages, even those close by.
By contrast, everything is stacked against Aussie thespians in terms of accent proficiency. Their own dialect is unusual and phonetically bizarre. They are isolated from all other accents of English. Immigration from other English-speaking countries, until fairly recently, was limited. And yet, as whole, they are the most accent-proficient actors on earth.
But I am sure Aussies are not the only example of this trend. What other small or isolated countries seem especially good at languages or dialects?
Related posts:
Not sure I understand what Amsterdam has got to do with Scandinavia? Stockholm or Oslo or Bergen maybe, but a city in the Netherlands?
What I meant was that if you, say, live in Copenhagen and you want to visit a major nearby city, you might want to learn a language besides Danish. Point being that in Scandinavian countries, which have languages with relatively tiny populations of speakers, learning other languages becomes unavoidable. In America, where going from one large city to another feels like international travel … not so much.
You don’t mention a very important factor. Practically every single Australian actor you can name has been on “Neighbours” or “Home and Away”. The former was incredibly popular in the UK in the 1980s at the same time as Stock, Aitken and Waterman were churning out the hits.
Two very popular cultural phenomena were merged and SAW began writing hits for Kylie Minogue, Jason Donovan and countless others Neighbours stars. “Neighbours” was the launching pad for Guy Pearce, Natalie Imbruglia, Delta Goodrom and, the blonde guy in “House” amongst others. Isla Fisher used to be on “Home and Away” which was particularly popular in Ireland and was shown in countless other countries. Basically the Aussie soaps were a ticket to stardom in music or at least getting a chance in Hollywood.
As to the difficulty for Australians in learning American accents I think that it is much easier than you might think. For a start many Australians have a very neutral accent which gets mistaken for an English accent. Another thing is that they hear American accents on television from a very young age. It is no different than for Irish people. If you have a neutral accent to start with it is not difficult to switch. I can see how a Scottish person might not be able to lose the accent but Canadians, Australians and Irish people often have soft accents and that goes some way to explaining there relative over-representation in the American and British entertainment industries. Of course wanting to swim in a bigger bond is a big motivation too
“Immigration from other English-speaking countries, until fairly recently, was limited”
Where do you get that? Australia is predominantly populated by a continuing 200-year-long steady stream of British and Irish immigrants.
Wow. I have no idea why I wrote that. There was probably some other modifier to “English-speaking” that I forgot to add, but I’m not sure what it was now.
First off, may I say how pleased I m to have been directed to your excellent blog by languagehat?
Next, and without wanting to denigrate the accent-adaptation skills of actors from the giant pnal colony to my west, why do you say “We Americans and Brits can afford to be lazier”? While that might be true for American actors, surely British actors have long had to master different accents? Hugh Laurie’s perfomance in House is just a recent example, but watching British television suggests that many British actors master many different accents.
Another interesting question related to your post might be why so few actors from anywhere have “returned the favour” by mastering the Australian accent, and far fewer still have managed the Kiwi accent. Admittedly, not many have tried, but the only one I’ve ever heard that didn’t have me almost literally rolling on the floor laughing was Anthony Hopkins in “The World’s Fastest Indian.”
Thanks, Stuart! I will say that I think younger British actors these days are more accent proficient. That being said, I have often found that older generations, particularly “Great Shakespearean Actors,” are surprisingly bad at accents. Some of it was training, and some of it is that RP was once treated as the only accent an actor ever needs to learn. But for the record, there are many Brits AND Americans who are excellent at accents; they just tend not to be the famous ones.
As to why Americans/Brits don’t learn Aussie accents? Probably because there isn’t a huge body of Australian dramatic literature that has cracked into worldwide consciousness. Ireland is a country with less than 1/3 of the population of Australia, but guess which accent we had to learn in drama school? Actors learn accents when they are necessary, and Australian accents aren’t all that necessary outside of Australia.
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There is actually not just the one ‘Australian accent’. There are broadly what are described as three ‘sociolects’. One is the ‘broad’ Australian sociolect, often found spoken by country people, and the accent often thought to be Australian by the rest of the world. It is characterised by being spoken slowly and not opening the mouth widely. Then there is the ‘general’ Australian sociolect, as spoken by most Australians. Thirdly, there is the unfortunately termed ‘cultured’ Australian sociolect, often found in privately educated Australians (especially Catholic schools) which sounds more English. Most of us can imitate the the alternative two sociolects to our own. Australians often ‘broaden’ their accents when travelling overseas. It is not unusual for Australians generally to be able to imitate accents of other countries.