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Rack off Hoges, we just don't like the way you speak

Strewth! The Aussie accent is losing its strine.

A study by two Macquarie University speech scientists, which is tracking a century of change in the Australian accent, has found an increasing shift away from the stereotypical broad Australian English - a la Paul Hogan - and a move to a more generalised form.

"Part of the reason is that the stereotypical accent has been stigmatised because it sounds really ocker," researcher Felicity Cox said. "People want to be more generally known as Australian but not carry those connotations of ockerism."

So how do we sound?

Well, the good news is we're not becoming more American. And thank "hivvens" we're not talking like Kiwis. We're also loath to use the cultivated Queen's English.

We are, according to Dr Cox, finding our identity through a more general accent, which is neither cultivated nor broad.

"Accent is not only a marker of personal identity but also a marker of national identity."

She said people are determined not to sound like Paul Hogan, the Crocodile Hunter or Kath and Kim.

"When we think of the broad stereotypical type we think of people like Steve Irwin. That accent is a kind of a caricature of an Australian. It's not real. It's also associated with something stereotypically Australian - from the past perhaps."

Dr Cox and her colleague, Dr Sallyanne Palethorpe, who have been studying the evolution of the Australian accent for the past 15 years, interviewed more than 500 people in Sydney, rural NSW and Victoria in an attempt to identify the three strands of Australian English: educated-cultivated, general and broad.

"We expected to find a cross-section of speakers from these three types but we actually found it quite difficult to find broad speakers in Sydney. They are more likely to be general."

As part of the study, they also compared the voices of Australians born in the 1880s with

those born a century later.

Dr Cox said the old recordings were found last year in a storeroom at the Speech, Hearing and Language Research Centre.

On the tapes are interviews with 12 rural men and women, from central-western NSW and Tasmania, on their life and Australian culture at the time. "It was just fabulous to listen to their voices," Dr Cox said.

These recordings were compared with voices of Australian teenagers today.

"With these older guys we were expecting that they would be quite broad, the most Australian of Australian accents, but in fact they weren't nearly as broad as we imagined they would be." This has prompted a rethink on when and how the broad Australian accent developed.

"It's possible it could have started in the First World War, and could be something to do with the diggers".

Dr Cox said that there was no evidence of the Australian accent becoming more American.

"We'll occasionally find words that are pronounced in the American way rather than the British way, but that's more to do with the lexicon, not the pronunciation of vowels."

"And we're certainly not seeing any New Zealand influence. In fact we're seeing a divergence."

There had been a move away from the cultivated, due perhaps to the republican movement and a shift from the mother country.

"What we find moreso is that kids today are more likely to speak like their peers, the people they grow up with," Dr Cox said.

She said there was no evidence to suggest private school students spoke differently to public school students from the same area.

... from SMH