What kind of accent do I have?

[Zanorath]

Hello,
I was just wondering what kind of accent do I have? I have lived in Australia all my life, but both of my parents are English. I'm presuming it is English, but I'm just wondering if it is some kind of strange Australian / English hybrid, or proper English. If it is, any idea what kind of English accent it is?
Here is link to a .mov audio file of me speaking a few words. It is very small >1mb: http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/303448/My%20Voice.mov
Thanks,
Sam.

[pyoung]

Originally Posted by Zanorath

Hello,
I was just wondering what kind of accent do I have? I have lived in Australia all my life, but both of my parents are English. I'm presuming it is English, but I'm just wondering if it is some kind of strange Australian / English hybrid, or proper English. If it is, any idea what kind of English accent it is?
Here is link to a .mov audio file of me speaking a few words. It is very small >1mb: http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/303448/My%20Voice.mov
Thanks,
Sam.

Dear Zanorath:
To my untrained American ear, your speech is "some kind of [strange] Australian / English hybrid," except I don't hear anything strange about it. The words that stood out for me as 'Australian' were 'blue cheese' and 'three'. The words in isolation sounded 'English' to me, so there is probably something about your cadence that sounded 'Australian'. The pronunciation of 'blue' was the most noticeably different to me.
I look forward to hearing from some British English speakers. their opinions will be more useful and their specific comments will be more precise.

Interesting! Thanks!

Petra

[David L.]

How honest do you want people to be!?

As a Brit who grew up in Australia, your speech is British with about one lapse into an Australian vowel -'cheese'. Instead of a pure 'eeeeze' sound, you go down into an 'ch-uh' - 'uh' as in 'up' -then we hear its continued influence as you say the -eeeze part.

It sounds like you have had two influences: predominantly someone who spoke English as in the south of the country -very mellifluous - and somebody with some grating Midlands sounds. There are also some words which sound like an uneducated person trying to be posh e.g. 'plarrstic' instead of 'plastic'.

You could have a particularly attractive speaking voice if you worked on pronouncing words rather than sliding over them e.g. (ask Stella to bring the blue cheese) 'witha' for 'with her'

How frank can you get.

[thod00]

British. I couldn't detect a regional accent, but then your speech was stilted as if you were reading aloud.

[Zanorath]

Yeah, well what you said all makes sense as my Mum grew up in Africa as my grandpa worked for one of the oil corps back then, and as both my grandparents on that side speak the queen's English I expect with no other influences until she went to boarding school she picked a lot of it up too. My dad on the other hand grew up in Guernsey, which happened to be where my mum went to boarding school, and so where they met. From what I've read the Guernsey accent is even quite similar to the Australian one, so that might be where the harsher sounds in some of my words come from.

Anyway, thanks all you. The reason I was asking was that some people who have been to England, at school had been saying my accent was really strange even compared to someone's from England, and I wanted to know if this was true or not.

[flinging haggis]

To my ears it sounds like you're an Australian who's trying to speak standard RP.

Or maybe it's fairer to say you have just a slight Aussie accent.

'Thick slabs of blue cheese' was where it was first obvious.
the /I/ tended to go a little bit to /i/, and the /u:/ in blue was a little diphthongised. Again, the 'ee' in cheese sounded a bit more like a diphthong.

O's /əʊ/ (to my ears) sounded a bit closer to /ʌʊ/, which I will admit is common in BrE these days, but is more prevalent in AusE.

I hope this is useful; I have extremely nit-picky ears and am constantly ruining movies for my wife in which Americans are played by Brits and so on. (or Aussies, in the case of Anthony LaPaglia on Without a trace)

Cheers,

Pascal