What sort of accent do I have?

[Samuel_1994]

Growing up in Australia, I've always wondered what sort of accent I actually have. My guess is that its some sort of southern English one, but I'm not 100% sure. This is a link to a voice recording I made of me reading a paragraph that supposedly contains enough information to identify it. Its in a .mov file because it was created with Quicktime, nonetheless it is just an audio recording.

http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/303448/My%20Voice.mov

Thank you,
Sam

[Soup]

Hi Samuel,

How wonderful it is to hear your voice. Wouldn't it be grand if the forum threads had audio!

About your accent. Having checked the southern Australian variations available ( Click here), your accent seems to be somewhere between that of Melbourne speakers and Perth speakers. That's according to the data available at that site.

[Raymott]

Originally Posted by Samuel_1994

Growing up in Australia, I've always wondered what sort of accent I actually have. My guess is that its some sort of southern English one, but I'm not 100% sure. This is a link to a voice recording I made of me reading a paragraph that supposedly contains enough information to identify it. Its in a .mov file because it was created with Quicktime, nonetheless it is just an audio recording.

http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/303448/My%20Voice.mov

Thank you,
Sam

It sounds like a basic cultured Australian accent with British pretensions.
Are you from Adelaide?
Otherwise it could be a British accent with Australian influences, such as you might have if you came to Australia as a child.

[Samuel_1994]

Both my parents and all my family have strong southern English accents but I live near Sydney and always have done. When I listened to the accents on that site, most of them sound very, well, Australian. Comparing them to my voice it sounds more similar to some of the more moderate English ones (not the full on RP though). Even though they aren't in the voice clip many of my words end up with English pronunciation, eg. Dance (with the long ar sound) and garage (ending up as ga-ridge) and in general just lacking that sort of drawling sound that a lot of Australians have.

[stuartnz]

To my New Zealand ears, your accent is very definitely Australian, but I can hear that it is less pronounced than most. It is likely the influence of the accents you grew up with. I know that my own NZ accent has small traces of the Anglo-Indian accent I heard from my sole parent father growing up. So your accent is a little different from other Australian accents, but your pronunciation of words like "big" is unmistakably Australian and I would never have picked your accent as being from any part of the UK