An Australian speech expert said the country’s famous accent can be attributed in part to the drunkenness of the nation’s early European settlers.
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Public speaking and communication lecturer at Victoria University, Dean Frankel, believes the “drunken slurring” of Australia’s colonial settlers has contributed to the way people speak today.
He explained in Australian newspaper The Age: “The Australian alphabet cocktail was spiked by alcohol”.
Frankel said the slurring of speech, a typical symptom of over-indulgence in alcohol, had been passed down from generation to generation, eventually leading to the population possessing “drunken Aussie-speak”.
While it certainly wouldn’t be fair to tar all Australians with the same brush, a few certainly seem to have tried their best to emulate their forefathers.
Mr Frenkel says the average Aussie speaks to just two thirds of their capacity, “With one third of our articulator muscles always sedentary as if lying on the couch; and that’s just concerning articulation”. You sure you don’t want a beer?
“Missing consonants can include missing “t ” s (impordant), “l ” s (Austraya) and “s ” s (yesh), while many of our vowels are lazily transformed into other vowels, especially “a ” s to “e ” s (stending) and “i ” s (New South Wyles), and “i ” s to “oi ” s (noight)”, he said.
Mr Frenkel said poor communication was “not related to class” but was evident among all sectors of Australian society.
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According to the Linguistics Department at Sydney’s Macquarie University, the flat and nasally Australian accent developed from a mix of dialects found in early settler colonies.
