Many accents get confused with one another: Canadian and American, Scottish and Northern Irish, Jamaican and Barbadian. But the granddaddy of all of them? The three-way mixup between Australian, New Zealand and South African English.
If you speak with one of these accents, and you live in the US, your accent has probably been identified incorrectly. “Are you like, British or something?” we say, a befuddled look on our faces. And if you’re from New Zealand or South Africa, many a poor soul has certainly mistaken you for Australian. I can only imagine what it’s like to constantly be told you’re from a country thousands of miles from where you grew up.
With that in mind, I hope to shed a little light on why these accents get mistaken for one another. But first, lets look at the similarities between them:
1.) Each tends to raise the “e” vowel in DRESS, so it may sound like “driss” to an American. (“Yis, please!”)
2.) Each tends to raise the “a” vowel in TRAP, so it may sound like “trep” to an American. (“Thet’s a bed idea, mate!”)
3.) They also tend to all front the “o” diphthong in words like GOAT, so that “boat” might sound a bit like “bout” to an American. (“Ow now! Thet’s terrible!”)
So all of these accents have some related vowel shifting. Fair enough. But how can you tell them apart? Let’s look at some clips, starting with Aussie English. Since we’re mostly discussing American misperceptions, whose accent is more fitting than that of Paul Hogan, Australia’s unofficial Australian ambassador in the 1980s?
I’ll pause a moment, and wait for Australians reading this to stop laughing.
Now contrast this with a New Zealand accent (courtesy of New Zealand comedian Rhys Darby):
At first listen, these two accents sound similar. There is one notable difference, however: the “i” in KIT: This vowel almost becomes an “ee” sound in AusE, so that bit can sound like American “beat” (IPA bit). In NZE, on the other hand, this is sound is retracted, so it’s closer to the “a” in comma: ( IPA bɘt).
There are some other differences in the quality of the vowels and diphthongs, but they are too slight to be noticed by many. So there’s enough overlap here that it’s easy to see how these two accents can get confused. The difference between the two is comparable to the difference between standard American and Canadian English: one or two pronounced differences, with a slew of much slighter differences.
But what about South African English? Listen to the speech of this well-known politician:
To my ears, this is a completely different can of worms. Because there’s really so much different here:
1.) Where the first two accents pronounce FATHER with a fairly fronted vowel for the “a,” in South African English this word sounds more like “fawther” (IPA fɒ:ðə).
2.) The South African dipthongs are also quite different than for the other two: the vowel in KITE is pronounced similarly to the way it is in American Southern English–“kaht” (IPA ka:t).
3.) The dipthong in words like MOUTH, meanwhile is even more unusual–”mouth” is nearly homophonous with American English “moth” (IPA mɑ:θ).
And those are only a few of the things that mark this accent as a very different animal. My conclusion: Kiwi and Aussie accents? Different, but similar enough that the confusion is understandable. But South African accents, although they share a similar vowel shift, belong in a very different category.
In defense of those who mistake South African accents for Australian, though, there are probably more similarities when you account for different variants of SA speech. As I’m mostly comparing middle-of-the-road types of each accent, I’d love to know more about some types of “sub-dialects” where there’s more overlap.
Are there Australian regional accents that sound particularly Kiwi? A city or town in New Zealand that sounds unusually Australian? Or types of all three accents that sound “British?”
No related posts.
Or types of all three accents that sound “British?”
I have met several South Africans whose speech I was unable to distinguish from RP-ish Britons. (I am, or was, an RP-ish Briton myself).
Same here. I had a South African professor in college who sounded like a very posh English woman. The only things in her speech that would possibly allow someone to identify her as South African would be the very back and unrounded [ɑɤ] she used for MOUTH and the “pure” monophthong [iː] in FLEECE. But there may be very posh English people who use the same pronunciations.
A very good example of this is author JM Coetzee — here is a a clip of him speaking. His accent has hardly anything recognizably “un-RP” in it at all.
Speaking with the ear of a kiwi .. uh.. anyway.. Australian accents vary a lot. It’s a huge country and I’d say the regional variation in Aussie accents is similar to that of the US – there’s a lot of it. To my ear the southeastern states sound more similar to us but still quite different, and there’s an area (somewhere near Tweed Head? could be wrong here) where the accent sounds a bit British.
To a Kiwi there’s a vast difference between our accent and the Australian one but I guess we’re attuned to the differences in ways that US folk aren’t. Accents within NZ vary too, but seem to have less regional influence. And you’re right, the South African accent is quite distinct from either – to me it sounds more German/Dutch/British with a smidgin of kiwi thrown in.
/ramble
I recall reading somewhere that Tazmania has a bit more of a Kiwi sound to it. Or at least the more pronounced DRESS–>”dress” thing in NZ accents is more pronounced there.
I had always heard that regional variation in oz was relatively low compared to the states though P: http://clas.mq.edu.au/australian-voices/regional-accents
That’s probably true–unlike American, Australia doesn’t have any rhotic/non-rhotic distinctions, or any dialectical divides as large as the Northern US and the Southern US. But I think Australia has more variation that people give it credit for. You’ll probably see more clearly defined divisions pop up as the 21st Century progresses.
“You’ll probably see more clearly defined divisions pop up as the 21st Century progresses.”
Definitely. All they need is time and someone to map the divisions
North-Eastern Australia is the closest to NZ.
Some Kiwis (usually from North Island, I think) sound very close to Australians. The only way to be sure is to ask them to say the shibboleth “fish and chips”, which they all pronounce “fəsh ənd chəps”.
The South African accent you’re describing seems to be that of white anglophone South Africans. Granted, they’re some of the ones you’re most likely to have met abroad, but they comprise less than 4% of the population. The breadth of accents in SA amongst English speakers is vast.
As for Australia, Adelaide tends to have a slightly more English accent. People from there sometimes say that it’s because convicts were never sent there so the prevailing accent is more refined. Not sure if I buy that but the difference is real.
The South African accent you’re describing seems to be that of white anglophone South Africans. Granted, they’re some of the ones you’re most likely to have met abroad, but they comprise less than 4% of the population.
Yes. Indeed, if Wikipedia is to be trusted, native English speakers (regardless of accent) comprise only 8% of the population.
The breadth of accents in SA amongst English speakers is vast.
Of course, particularly if one includes all those who speak English as a second or subsequent language.
I still think it’s somewhat interesting (to me, at least) that the only non-Britons whose accents I am unable to identify as such have been South Africans.
I agree, Richard–South Africa is one of the most linguistically diverse nations on earth. This makes dividing English into dialects there tricky, as the vast majority of English-speakers have some type of non-English influence on their speech.
I do, however, think there are certain characteristics that have become common across a large spectrum of South African English. For example, Cape Town mayor Dan Plato clearly has a lot of non-English influence in his speech (as this clip testifies), but he still has many of the features discussed above.
Am Canadian, have worked in the States & UK & Oz, married to a Kiwi, travel a lot. To my ear the South African Englishes are the most beautiful. I refer to the two mainstream accents, educated black native English speaker and educated white native English speaker. Quite distinct and only related here and there, but both very nice.
My second favorite would be the rapidly-vanishing true American Western, found for example in Colorado before it vanished behind a screen of Denver suburbs, Boulder hippies, and Colorado Springs uniforms.
Speaking from an Irish perspective it can be hard to tell straight away if somebody is from NZ. I have met Australians with RP type accents who I guessed (wrongly) were from NZ.
To me white anglophone South African accents often sound English. Those who speak Afrikaans as a first language have a very distinctive accent even when they speak perfect English (Ernie Els being a great example of what I mean). There is an enormous variety of SA accents in between because of so many other languages being spoken in the country, mixed language backgrounds and the fact that there has been waves of immigrants from Great Britain and The Netherlands (amongst other countries) who would have pulled the accent to and fro.
Els occasionally lets loose “trilled” or “tapped” r (which you can also hear in the clip of Cape Town’s mayor that I posted above). It’s funny, because as you mention, he otherwise speaks relatively unaccented English!
A very helpful blog, thank you! I’m a Kiwi who is quite prepared to acknowledge the very close similarities between our accent and that of many Australians. It’s understandable why so many others confuse the two, but it will be interesting to see what effect the developing regional accents, on both sides of the Tasman, have on this problem. How ANYONE can mistake South African English for an ANZAC version totally escapes me. There’s just something about Afrikaaner English in particular that makes my skin crawl. Illogical, unfounded and pointless, but listening to someone whose first language is Afrikaans speak English is like fingernails down the chalkboard of my soul.
Your last sentence is nothing more than raw prejudice against a group of people based on their accent. Clearly there is so much more to it. Why don’t you just come out and say it?
I think my ear is attuned to the difference between Kiwi and Australian accents–the difference is huge to me, MUCH different from “American” vs. Canadian. I’m American and often can’t identify Canadians. (I’m from the west coast, though I speak some weird mishmash accent/dialect that gets me asked if I’m a foreigner no matter where I am.)
There was a time when Southern American accents all sounded about the same to me, but now I live in a place where we get Southern visitors from a few different areas. When I first moved here I thought the people had a slight Southern accent, but after two years I can’t hear it anymore–I probably have it myself. But I can pick out a Kentuckian a mile away. (I LOVE the Kentucky dialect–so slow and musical.)
I’m curious why the Australian variants would become more pronounced this century. Won’t they become less pronounced with greater exposure to national media? That seems to be what’s happening here.
“Are you like, British or something?” asked in the US does not really indicate that the American really thinks that the person is British. It is code for “You English-speaking foreigners all sound alike to me.”
A number of good points have been made about the different South African accents; there are also regional differences. White native speakers of English in Cape Town sound as distinct from their peers in Johannesburg as, say, speakers from Chicago and Boston.
Interesting stuff. Quick bit of background so you know where I get my opinions…. I have a PhD in linguistics, and while my main specialisations are Australian Aboriginal languages and formal theoretical linguistics, I do also research and teach on varieties of English. I am also an actor, director and voice coach, and Artistic Director of the Queensland Shakespeare Ensemble.
I can’t say too much about S African English (cuz I don’t know too much), though to my ears this is the odd one out of the trio, and the most distinct.
Within Australia, received wisdom for many decades (since the pioneering work of Mitchell and Delbridge in the mid 1960s) has held that there is quite a lot of variation, but that it is NOT regional per se, but determined by class, gender, and urban vs rural. They identified three broad varieties, General Australian, Broad Australian, and Educated Australian. Paul Hogan is generally considered Broad Australian, and therefore not representative of the bulk of Australian English speakers. The Crocodile Hunter, the late Steve Irwin, on the other hand, spoke more General Australian, with a few nods to Broad. Dame Edna speaks Educated Australian. Generally, men speak General or Broad, women speak General or Educated. In the cities you tend to get Educated and General, away from the cities it’s general and broad. Some scholars, such as Barbara Horvath and Felicity Cox, have noted that in recent decades, there has been a shift away from both Broad and Educated, in favour of general.
However, recent prime ministers of Australia have gone for the Broad Australian sound. The first to do so was Bob Hawke in the 1980s (before him Prime Ministers generally spoke Educated Australian), but since then also John Howard and Julia Gillard (the current, and Australia’s first woman, PM). In fact Gillard’s broad accent sounds a little odd to some, perhaps because it’s coming from a woman. There may be other reasons more to do with style and delivery than accent why people think she sounds funny.
It is generally held (by linguists, though non-linguists will swear black and blue to the contrary) that, Adelaide aside, which does appear to have its own thing going on, you can’t pick a middle class white person from one city versus another, eg Sydney versus Melbourne versus Perth versus Brisbane. I grew up in Perth (west) and live in Brisbane (east). There is no difference in the range of accents.
That’s the old story. The contemporary story recognises that most of the above is true, but there are also several new accents in Australia, from the various forms of Aboriginal English (not that new, but only recently has anyone paid serious attention to them) to a variety known as Wogspeak, or by the far more PC term New Australian English. You can hear classic examples of this on the Aussie TV show Pizza, or from the character Effie Stefanidis (played by Mary Coustas). This variety seems to have emerged in the last two decades, originally among second generation immigrants (mostly Meditteranean) in Melbourne and Sydney, but now, and largely thanks to the power of hip hop, spreading to become an urban youth variety.
Again not so much difference between one city and another. However I have recently read some claims that Melbourne seems to be developing its own offshoot of General Australian, which involves among other things, lowering of “e” to “a” (as in ‘hat’) – so they say “hallo I’m from Malbourne”. However other people have noticed exactly the same changes in Sydney…. I think it’s an upper-middle class thing, it has slight overtones of elitism, and maybe people think it’s from Melbourne because Melbourne has more pretentious people per capita than any other Australian city
So yes, there are many varieties in Australia, but rather than defined by region, they are defined by social class, race, gender, etc. Which is not so surprising for a large country with a generally low population density.
Someone here commented that NZ English sounds more like the NE of Australia. That’s somewhat baffling, given that the NE of Australia is one of the less inhabited parts, it’s Northern Queensland and the Eastern Northern Territory, which would be home to the Broad Australian accent (generally), as in Paul Hogan/Crocodile Dundee.
Maybe I’ll save my comments on NZ English for a second post.
Love,
Rob
OK if you managed to make it through all that, here’s something on NZ English.
While the original sources of NZ and Aust English are similar, NZ had a higher proportion of Scots and English free settlers versus the cockney and Irish convicts providing the numbers for European settlement in Australia. It is generally held that both have their origins in Cockney English.
What’s happened in NZ is a continuation of the vowel shift, which hasn’t taken place in Australia, but has (I believe) for some speakers of South African English.
So, as mentioned in the original post here, the “i” vowel in “bit” in NZ English is more centralised. However, it’s not quite a schwa (as in the “a” in “comma”), which is a true central vowel, but a high central (unrounded) vowel. Represented in the IPA by an [i] with a line through it. Naive Australians often represent this as a “u”, claiming the Kiwis say “fush and chups” for “fish and chips”.
But that’s not the only one. In NZ you will also hear the following changes for many (though not all) speakers:
e –> i (so “sex” becomes “six” – “would you like to hev six tonight?”)
ae –> e (so “hat” becomes “het”, likewise in long vowels, so that “dad” can sound like “dared” (non-rhotic))
Those are the main ones. We actually had a PhD student here at the Uni of Queensland about a decade ago who was working on this, she noted that the changes I’ve mentioned are actually quite recent, so that you will hear them more clearly among younger than older speakers. They are also more common among women than men.
When I was in NZ about 20 years ago, I met three generations of women from the same family, all born and grew up in the same town near Auckland, NZ. The grandma sounded almost British (SE England) to me. The ‘mum’ sounded pretty much like an Australian to me. Yet the youngest one sounded very distinctly New Zealand.
“Hillo, hev you got a pin?” [Hello, have you got a pen?]
“Shut, Tim, someone’s dinted the Sutrun.” [Shit, Tim, someone's dented the Citroen]
I will now dodge missiles hurled from across the Tasman.
Love,
Rob
Rob,
Great stuff. One thing I’m curious about is the ae –> e | e –> i thing in Australia. Here is a vowel chart of contemporary Australian English (it was uploaded to Wikimedia, but I’ve seen similar charts in actual academic texts). What’s interesting is that “e” sound in “dress” is still raised (it is actually fairly close to American short i). But the “a” in “trap” is close to the position in American English.
This suggest there has been a bit of “correction” in AusE in recent years (as you mention above). I’m curious if a lot of the differences between NZE and AusE are products of the latter disassociating itself from more broad “Southern Hemispheric” features.
“But the “a” in “trap” is close to the position in American English.”
One little and maybe trivial thing I’ve noticed is that Aussies raise this vowel before front nasal consonants (I’m not sure about /ŋ/ though). This is similar to the so-called “nasal system” of American English. The Wikipedia article “Phonological history of English short A” talks about this. Although unlike in American English, I don’t ever hear ingliding diphthongal allophones of the [eə] type from Aussies. It’s more along the lines of [ɛː ~ eː]. So words like sand and ram are pronounced quite differently compared to how they’re pronounced in England. However, trap itself may or may not be different.
No missiles from this Kiwi, Rob. I’d say your timeline of the 3 generations sounds about right too. Do you have anything to add on on the developing regional accents within NZE?
I’d say the US-Canadian difference is much smaller than the Australia-NZ difference. I’m an American and usually can’t pick out a Canadian accent until they say “about”. I live in Australia now, and when I visit NZ, the difference is quite noticeable. And you’d think that, as an American, I’d be less sensitive to that difference.
It really depends. There is less difference between Canadian and most West Coast accents than between Canadian and, say, Alabama. And for some Canadian accents, the signature vowel shift is less noticeable. So it really depends on whom you’re comparing to whom.
As a South African, to me the aussie and kiwi accents basically sound the same, but the kiwi accent sounds a bit more british than the aussie accent, which actually sounds alot like the south african Durban region accent.
There are variations in the SA accent and it sounds very different from our southern hemisphere cousins because of the larger array of influences on it due to the high amount of different language groups in the country.
Cape Town locals have a laid back drawl to their accent.
The durban accent as i’ve stated sounds vaguely similar to the aussie accent, a bit of a drawl.
The johannesburg and pretoria accents have a stronger afrikaans influence (which itself is a creole of german,dutch,french,english,local african languages and surprisingly some arabic) and obviously within these regional accents there are differences depending on what cultural group the speaker comes from.
British and Irish people have told me though that my accent sounds “very posh”