I'd never heard of 'dialect leveling' before.
>According to Richards, the beginning of our Australian accent emerged following the arrival of European settlers in 1788.
>"It emerged from a process called levelling down because you had all these people who came here on 11 ships from different dialect areas, regional dialect areas across England," he said.
>"They all spoke differently and they used different words and what they had to do, in order to communicate with each other, was to level their dialect variations down."
>Around 50 years after the colony was established, Richards said English people arriving in Australia started to claim that Australians were speaking the "purest English on earth".
>This discovery period of other ways of speaking and other words for things brought an acute awareness of the language and sound.
>"What our accent really is, is English with the dialect variations taken out.
>"We now think of it as being our dialect, and it is, but that's what was happening in those early [days], it happened really fast."
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-03-16/the-story-behind-australian-english/6315078
In 1950 the voices of people from distant and remote parts of the continent in their 80s and 90s was recorded and they showed no variation in the way they spoke. Apparently English in it's purest form, no accent.
I'd love to hear those recordings to see how it compares to how we sound today.
tree life /
npub1lgl…lcra
2024-01-16 00:11:16
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npub1lglsp23xf55a3qhl7z9pmsevfx0tge6whnltjjvvq5739qer8sdqfjlcraPublished at
2024-01-16 00:11:16Event JSON
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"content": "I'd never heard of 'dialect leveling' before.\n\n\u003eAccording to Richards, the beginning of our Australian accent emerged following the arrival of European settlers in 1788.\n\n\u003e\"It emerged from a process called levelling down because you had all these people who came here on 11 ships from different dialect areas, regional dialect areas across England,\" he said.\n\n\u003e\"They all spoke differently and they used different words and what they had to do, in order to communicate with each other, was to level their dialect variations down.\"\n\n\u003eAround 50 years after the colony was established, Richards said English people arriving in Australia started to claim that Australians were speaking the \"purest English on earth\".\n\n\u003eThis discovery period of other ways of speaking and other words for things brought an acute awareness of the language and sound.\n\n\u003e\"What our accent really is, is English with the dialect variations taken out.\n\n\u003e\"We now think of it as being our dialect, and it is, but that's what was happening in those early [days], it happened really fast.\"\nhttps://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-03-16/the-story-behind-australian-english/6315078\n\nIn 1950 the voices of people from distant and remote parts of the continent in their 80s and 90s was recorded and they showed no variation in the way they spoke. Apparently English in it's purest form, no accent.\n\nI'd love to hear those recordings to see how it compares to how we sound today.",
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