Why the Aussie accent is so hard to understand?

It is really challenging because it’s similar to a lot of different accents, it has components of a lot of different accents and I think that’s where people get derailed. Leith McPherson is a dialect coach, and the Head of Voice at the Victorian College of the Arts. She says” I always find it quite pleasing when I listen to accent tapes where one person is demonstrating 17 different accents, and you go wow, impressive, and they get to the Australian and you go, nah.”

To understand the intricacies of the Aussie accent, we have to look at how it was born. The Australian accent started more than 200 years ago in January 1788, when the first European settlement landed. Aboriginal Australians were already here at the time, of course, but English was a foreign language to them. The first colonies of Australia mainly came from south-eastern England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales. It was the children of these colonists who would’ve created the Australian accent. These children had their parents’ accents, but also would’ve been influenced by the other children around them.

By the 1830s, these different sounds caused a new and distinct accent to emerge. Even as late as the mid-1900s, you can still hear that British influence. But overtime, those traits decreased as people embraced the Australian identity. This constant change has evolved the accent into what we know today as Australian English. So why is it so hard for others to get right? Leith McPherson says” I think it’s because of that familiarity, so your brain will always, is always looking for patterns. It’s always looking for things that it already knows.”

Take for example, Robert Kazinsky: he's a British actor playing an Australian character in Pacific Rim. And it ends up sort of sounding like a weird kind of Cockney sort of thing that people are doing, and you think 'ah, that’s what your brain is hearing', your brain is hearing that pattern and then grouping it all together.

There are three general groupings of the accent: cultivated, broad, and general. But nowadays those definitions aren’t really adequate, as we've shifted towards a more general accent. A better way to group the accent would be Standard Australian, Aboriginal English, and Ethnocultural Australian English. That last one reflects the fact that everyone has an idiolect — your own accent is shaped by the history of where you’ve lived and who you’ve grown up with, so we all sound a bit different from each other.

But there are plenty of common traits. So, when people are actually making a statement, but they’re actually going up in tune, as they’re talking to you. And you may notice that quite a lot, but again it doesn’t happen everywhere, it’s not a distinguishing characteristic but it is a trait which American speakers for example would have to learn. The hesitation sound, which is a really good way of figuring out how someone’s mouth works in a different accent or language. So, to know that that’s where the Australian tongue rests is hugely helpful for like if, um, like for Scots if I’m doing like a Scottish accent, um, like that’s their hesitation sound which is really high and forward, takes a lot of effort for us but that’s where their tongue rests, so for them to just drop back to ahh gives you a sense of the whole landscape that you’re working with.

And there are plenty of other common traits, like our lack of enunciation and our sing-songy flow. But who knows — with technology connecting us to other cultures and ways of speaking, maybe in 100 years we’ll sound totally different. It's interesting to see that maybe we might have more of an American influence coming in and less of a British influence. What an exciting journey.

any accent is a difficult task — and sometimes actors aren’t given enough time to learn an accent during a busy production period. So, while they might've been able to do the accent off set, they weren't able to do it on set.