The history of the Aussie accent! Note: this is useful for Unit 4 AOS 1!

[dmitridr]

I recently stumbled across a very interesting article online, which seems to have been published on a few months ago:

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-03-16/the-story-behind-australian-english/6315078

Some schools would now be starting Unit 4 AOS 1, so this will give you a good head start on how the Australian accents (Broad, General, Cultivated) formed since colonisation.

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About 100 years on from the First Fleet, Richards said the arrival of the elocution movement (Cultivated accent) in the 1880s and 1890s "ambushed" our language and changed it for good.

"It started off on how to annunciate and speak clearly but what they did was pick one dialect, standard southern English, and they said 'that is correct'.

"Standard southern English came to be what is called RP, Received Pronunciation, Oxbridge, that kind of accent.

"That was right, everything else was wrong."

According to Richards, before this time general, middle Australian accents were predominant before cultivated and broad Australian accents arrived later, as a reaction to the elocution movement.

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I hope this helps!