Aussie Speech Patterns Caused By Excessive Alcohol Use?
Posted: Thu Oct 29, 2015 10:21 pm
http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Aust ... 598671.php
at least until the liquor runs out............Australian university: Aussie accent is result of generations of heavy drinking
By Alyssa Pereira
Published 12:57 pm, Thursday, October 29, 2015
Are you unable to understand your Australian colleague's thick accent at work? Do you lose interest in rugby matches because you can't comprehend the commentary? Is this you?
Australia knows your struggle, but as one Victoria University in Melbourne theory suggests, the country can no longer claim that their distinct vocal pattern is the product of dialects blending together. Rather, the researchers claim, the country's natives have thick accents because they keep getting drunk and hanging out all the time.
Communications lecturer Dean Frenkel, the presenter of this theory, says that Aussies use just 2/3 of the muscles that influence articulation capacity, often dropping consonants crucial to words often used, like for example, the "l" in "Australia," the "t" in "important," or the "s" in "yes."
And why is that? Frenkel says we can blame it on the alcohol.
"Our forefathers regularly got drunk together and through their frequent interactions unknowingly added an alcoholic slur to our national speech patterns," he says "...Aussie-speak developed in the early days of colonial settlement from a cocktail of English, Irish, Aboriginal and German – before another mystery influence was slipped into the mix."
That "influence" ended up being a hangover that never ended, at least in terms of Aussie dialect. And we're just going to have to get over it. Like all aspects of national accents, this one won't be going away any time soon.
