British YouTuber Sam Ford has travelled around Australia studying accents and believes there are unique speech patterns inherent in the voices of Perth.
While not a professional linguist or dialect coach, Mr Ford is a trained actor and musician who enjoys observing the intricacies of speech.
In a recent YouTube video, he unpacked his observed variations between capital cities, claiming he doesn’t believe there’s one generic national accent despite such claims from Aussies he’s met.
“Hearing Sydney locals speak in their accent compared to how someone would speak in Adelaide sounded completely different,” he said.
“If anyone says to you, ‘Australia doesn’t have multiple accents’, they’re wrong.”
Mr Ford singled out the Adelaide accent, claiming it sounded “really really British”.
He wondered if WA would mirror South Australia considering how isolated it is from the east coast, admitting he had never visited Perth before.
Playing a variety of recorded Perth voices made available online on an International Dialects of English Archive, he identified intricacies in the accents of West Aussies from various periods.
The first was a 32-year-old male’s reading voice — born in 1993 — which he labelled “really well spoken”.
Conceding an accent was also dictated by personality, he said the modern male’s voice “feels very confident, very ‘I know what I’m talking about and I don’t need to over-emphasise an over-pronounced word to sound more extravagant’”.
“It’s kind of like . . . take the Aussie accent and make it a bit more posh,” he said.
Mr Ford felt the voice contained “soft vowel sounds,” whereas a Brisbane accent typically contained vowel sounds that were “a little bit more harsh, a little bit more emphasised and a little bit more twangy”.
He added the man had a tendency to “join his words” and was “borderline” slurring, though in a way that would build trust with whom he was speaking, as if expressing himself honestly.
Mr Ford then dissected a 25-year-old woman’s voice from 1999, saying the voice “sounds really British to me”, though conceding such a voice today would likely have evolved.
Listening to another male voice, a 26-year-old in 2010 — Mr Ford noticed the man began a sentence at a baseline but then pitched higher in the middle of it, then back down.
Another observation was the man “snapped” some vowels, and “elongates” others.
He added the Perth speakers appeared to “get through the dialogue faster than someone in Brisbane who also joins their words together, but who would drag out the vowel sounds and some of the consonants”.
The YouTuber dispelled a perception among actors that Aussies speak nasally, and claimed it would be more accurate to consider how the “vowel sound sits in the mouth”.
His analysis was received well by Perth residents in the comments, as locals offered their take on the nuances of their speaking voice.
“I reckon the accents in Perth vary a lot more based on suburb — the more ‘bogan’ areas sound a lot more broad, while lots of people in more ‘inner city’ suburbs will tend to sound more like the first two recordings,” one person said.
Another added: “I live in Perth, and this sounds exactly like a Perth person READING a passage, but when we are chatting it sounds more animated and musically, the words ‘bounce’ a bit more. But yeah, sounds right on to me. The third reader is the closest to the accents I hear each day.”
One user suggested the surest way to identify the origin of an Aussie would be to hear them say “beer”.
“An east coaster will drag the ‘ee’ sound, with almost no ‘r’ sound at the end — beeeer. Whereas a West Aussie will say it with a sharp clip ‘a’ sound at the end — ‘bee-ah’ .... The correct way to say it of course,” they wrote.
“As a Perth person I get told we mumble a lot. I feel like that’s what you’re referring to with ‘joining’ the words together,” another said.
This video is not Mr Ford’s first dissecting Aussie culture, with others breaking down things Aussies “do better” than Brits, as well as various cultural nuances he has noticed.
