What do the British TV series Peaky Blinders, Outlander, The Crown, Broadchurch and Geordie Shore have in common? Not the accents, that's for sure.

Key points: Australia is much bigger than the UK in terms of area, but there is far less variation in accents

Australia is much bigger than the UK in terms of area, but there is far less variation in accents Time and place are major factors in the evolution of speech patterns

Time and place are major factors in the evolution of speech patterns Social status and class have been stronger influences than geography on accent variations in Australia

Each of these shows is set in a different region of the British Isles which, despite their small size, are rich in vocal variation.

That's in stark contrast to Australia.

Apart from the distinctively ocker Alf Stewart, Home and Away's speech patterns closely resemble those of Neighbours, even though the two soaps are set and filmed almost 1,000 kilometres apart.

While there are many different accents in Australia, including Indigenous and migrant accents, linguists agree that general Australian speech is fairly homogenous compared to the United Kingdom.

So why has Australia — a country of great distances — failed to develop anything like the same diversity as the land once referred to as the "mother country"?

A tale of time and space

In England you don't have to travel far to hear the accents change. Several British cities have distinct sounds, and the locals take great pride in them.

Manchester and Liverpool are about 55 kilometres apart — which is only slightly less than Brisbane and the Gold Coast — yet 'Manc' speech is distinctively different to the so-called 'Scouse' sound of, say, Paul McCartney.

There are also Brummie (Birmingham), Cockney (east London) and Geordie (Newcastle) accents, as well as different sounds across Wales and Scotland.

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The harsh speech of Northern Ireland is strikingly different to the softer sound of the Republic, and all these differences are due to history and geography.

"Accents are about time and place," Macquarie University language expert Professor Felicity Cox said.

"They are constantly in flux, but there are certain social events that might cause slight glitches to the patterning. For example, migration can do that."

Over the last 2,000 years, England was invaded and settled by Celts, Romans, Angles, Saxons, Vikings and Normans. Their cultures intermingled, and so did their languages.

Vikings marauded across the British Isles following the Saxon migrations. ( The History Channel )

But once they settled somewhere, the local inhabitants of Britain tended to stay put — research published as recently as last month revealed as many as 3.5 million of today's Brits have never visited London.

According to Professor John Hajek, a linguistic expert at the University of Melbourne, this lack of travel is what allowed regional accents to develop in isolation from one another.

"There are still a lot of people who'll stay in their local area and not move out, whereas in Australia we're super mobile," he said.

"Australians on average move house every seven years."

Learning English, Irish, Scottish and Welsh

Most of us love a good (or bad) accent, even though some of us seem a little better than others when it comes to putting one on.

Jennifer Innes trains aspiring actors to sound like they're from somewhere else. ( Supplied )

But Adelaide actor and accent coach Jennifer Innes firmly believes the skill of sounding like you're from somewhere else can be learned.

Innes helps aspiring local thespians imitate the speech patterns of the UK and Ireland.

"Every time I get a job come in — unless it's something I teach a lot — I sit down, I recap, I listen, I break it down phonetically. I immerse myself in that world," she said.

"I was a very shy child and so I spent a lot of time listening. I'm not one of those people who goes to parties and puts accents on as a party trick."

Some accents are easy to acquire — many of us have probably noticed Australian friends who've lived in London who sound slightly more English when they return home.

A popular one is the West Country accent, which is spoken by the inhabitants of the south-west of England — in Cornwall, Somerset and Devon.

It is the stereotypical sound produced by pirates and farmers.

Other accents are harder to mimic, but they can be made easier with the help of key phrases, also known as 'springboard sentences', which emphasise the essential elements of an accent.

Cornwall in south-west England is known for its distinctive pirate-like accent. ( AP: Ben Birchall )

For example, Geordie speech (think of British singer Cheryl) is known for its unusual diphthongs (or elongated vowel sounds), which make words like "down" and "road" sound more like "doo-uhn" and "roared".

"When you're wanting to get into an accent really quickly, you often will put together a little phrase that will allow you to spring straight into the accent, and it will contain a lot of those key sounds," Ms Innes said.

Another distinctive accent is Brummie, which is spoken in Birmingham in England's West Midlands and has been compared (perhaps unkindly) to the sound of having a cold.

It was recently brought to prominence by the show Peaky Blinders.

"For some reason it's a very difficult accent to get right, harder even than Geordie," the show's creator, Steven Knight, said in 2014.

How British accents became Aussie

Accents are statistical — they emphasise certain sounds at the expense of others.

"They are about how people produce their vowels and consonants, how those go together to make words and sentences, and rhythm and intonation," Professor Cox said.

Working out how accents change is a subtle art that involves a sensitive ear and an appreciation of phonetics.

The First Fleet included convicts from across Britain as well as several former slaves of African descent. ( Algernon Talmage/State Library of NSW, public domain )

Written records and informed guesswork allow specialists to reverse engineer accents, to get an idea of how people spoke before the invention of recording devices.

Early European settlers to Australia — many of whom were convicts — were from all over Great Britain and Ireland, and their speech patterns blended to form the new Australian accent.

"We believe that came about through the speech of children," Professor Cox said.

"They basically took aspects of the languages they heard around them and created their own new variety of English."

That process occurred gradually, but quickly enough for new arrivals to start noticing the difference as early as the 1820s, and travel helped consolidate the trend.

"In 1851, Australia got the gold rush and that turned us into a nation of travellers," ABC radio regular Professor Roly Sussex said.

"People who turned up in Australia and started living in, say, Geelong might well have ended up in Newcastle, so there was this kind of mixing effect of accents."

Teaching the King's English

At first, Australians were proud of their new accent, but that began to change as speech came to be regarded as an indicator of social status.

So-called received pronunciation — the well-to-do way of speaking associated with the British upper class — became a major influence, especially on radio.

"There was quite a British sound to the national broadcasting corporation when it first began in Australia," Ms Innes said.

British singer Cheryl, from Newcastle upon Tyne, speaks with a Geordie accent. ( Wikimedia Commons: Georges Biard )

There are slight regional variations in the Australian accent. More than a third of Melburnians, for example, pronounce the name of their city as MAL-bourne, Professor Hajek said.

People from Adelaide are widely believed to sound more English, or more 'posh'.

Migration trends might be partly to blame. As is often pointed put, South Australia was not a convict colony, making it more likely to have attracted affluent settlers.



In the 1960s, Adelaide's northern and southern suburbs became strongholds of so-called Ten Pound Poms — such as Glasgow-born Jimmy Barnes — who had migrated en masse to provide labour for Australia's post-war boom.

But that raises another important point about the Australian accent: social status and class have been stronger influences than geography.

"What Australian English is noted for is not so much regional variation, but social variation," Professor Hajek explained.

"There was traditionally a greater emphasis amongst part of Adelaide's population — the upper-middle classes — on speaking 'properly', on speaking more correctly."

When the Royal family needed a speech therapist, they recruited Adelaide-born Lionel Logue. ( Wikimedia Commons )

When the British Royal family needed a speech therapist to help King George VI manage his stammer during the 1930s, who did they turn to?

None other than Lionel Logue, the hero of the film The King's Speech, who was born and raised in Adelaide.

A nation of drunks?

Several years ago, an academic at Melbourne's Victoria University suggested the Australian accent may be the result of heavy drinking by early settlers.

"Our forefathers regularly got drunk together and through their frequent interactions unknowingly added an alcoholic slur to our national speech patterns," Dean Frenkel wrote.

"Aussie-speak developed in the early days of colonial settlement from a cocktail of English, Irish, Aboriginal and German."

Some have speculated the Australian penchant for a pint influenced the accent. ( Pexels )

It's a titillating idea, even if some remain sceptical.

"I think that's a long shot," said Luzita Fereday, a voice specialist at the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts.

"I lived in London for 25 years, there's a pub on every corner. There's so much drinking that goes on in London, so why hasn't that affected the speech?"

Ms Fereday knows a thing or two about changing her accent.

Luzita Fereday is a voice specialist in Perth. ( Supplied )

Growing up in Indonesia as the daughter of English parents, she attended an international school and learned to speak with a slight American twang.

"When I moved to London at 17, I was told 'you can't sound American, you have to change your accent'," she said.

"When you went to drama school, you were told you had to lose your accent if you wanted any work at all."

Drunken speech does, however, prove something important — we tend to think of ourselves as having a fixed accent, but we actually change the way we speak depending on a range of factors, including who we are speaking with.

In linguistics, this is known as "accommodation".

"Australians are very good at that," Professor Hajek said.

"You can be sure you're going to be speaking very differently to your garbo than you are to the Governor-General."

Practice makes perfect

If accents can bring people together, they can also be used in the opposite way — to emphasise differences between groups, sometimes for political or social reasons but other times for comic effect.

"It's called 'in-group identification'. What you do is those things that mark you as different — you exaggerate them," Professor Hajek said.

Saoirse Ronan was raised in Ireland, but used a Scottish accent to play Mary, Queen of Scots. ( Supplied: Focus Features )

Upper-class speech is a clear example of this. For centuries, the British aristocracy used speech as a symbol of social status.

Another example at the other end of the social spectrum is so-called mockney, the "mock Cockney" favoured by actors in London gangster films — who use it to sound tough — as well as comedians such as Rob Brydon, who is famous for his impressions of Mick Jagger and Michael Caine.

"He's obviously been playing with language for a long time, mimicking people's accents," Professor Hajek said of Brydon.

"Practice makes perfect."

It's an undeniable truth in anyone's language — or accent.