Ay Good Day Mate!

As you can probably already assume from the title of this post, I’ll be talking about the Aussie accent, but I’d also like to explore the Kiwi accent, which is from New Zealand, and sounds almost identical to the Australian accent. Keep in mind that I will only be generally speaking when explaining about these accents.

The Australian accent has always truly fascinated me. At first, I thought the Australian accent sounded really weird and it was hard for me to imitate it. However, the more I listened carefully and repeated after I heard the pronunciation of how certain Australians talk (aka Cody Simpson), I started to genuinely love the accent and it is now one of my favourite English accents in the world! The most important thing to know about this accent is to never pronounce the r in words, so words like car is pronounced as cah.

Now for the Kiwi accent, I haven’t heard a lot about this one but I do find it very interesting. While I was browsing on Youtube, watching different videos made by New Zealanders, I have come to the conclusion that the accent sounds not only like the Aussie accent, but it has a hint of Scottish and Irish in there sometimes. The thing that came out the most while studying the Kiwi accent is how the vowel “e” in the middle of words sound more like the vowel “i”. For example, yes would sound like yis, let’s would sound like lit’s, and dress becomes driss. I’ve realised that this makes them sound quite inarticulate, but it makes it more fun when it comes to mimicking the accent.

Although it’s hard sometimes to tell these two accents apart, they do have their differences. I’ve learned that the Aussie accent over pronounces words and the Kiwi accent is more likely to under pronounce them. No matter how ridiculous these accents may sound sometimes, they’re both definitely on my I-Wish-I-Had-This-Accent list.

Sources:

http://dialectblog.com/2011/05/04/south-african-kiwi-aussie/

http://www.felixexi.com/how-to-speak-with-an-australian-accent-for-american-dummies/