From Hobart to Humpty Doo the Australian accent is easy to recognise, but can you tell the state or territory a person comes from by listening to the way they speak?

A national database of Australian voices may soon answer that question.

The Austalk project has recorded the voices of 800 people around Australia and has just reached the Northern Territory.

The job of finding the true voice of the Top End has fallen to linguist Bruce Birch, who said accent was an important part of identity in every society.

"Language has what's called an identity function," he said.

"'Our mob talks like this, that mob talks like this, your mob talks like that. You say that, we don't say that, we say it this way'. You know, it sounds different."

Larisa Lee, an Aboriginal woman and parliamentarian, said the number of Aboriginal languages spoken every day in the NT affects the sound of spoken English.

"In different regions you have different dialects," she said.

"Just with creole alone, there are probably five or six different dialects in different regions and each region has their own. And that's the same in Central Australia.

"Every region has its own dialect and that's so unique in the Northern Territory."

History of contact has created unique northern speech

Mr Birch is keen to capture the accented English spoken by Aboriginal people in the Territory.

"We have something like a 30 per cent Indigenous population in the Northern Territory, which is quite different to the rest of the country," he said.

"A really important factor [in the NT accent] is the long-term co-existence or co-habitation of Aboriginal people with non-Indigenous people in the Territory.

"English has been the contact language between those groups and [has been] evolving through that process."

Territory accents have been shaped by the history of Aboriginal people living alongside non-Indigenous people, linguist Bruce Birch says. ( ABC News )

Because of this history, Mr Birch said, it was important half the voices he recorded in the Territory were of Aboriginal men and women and the other half non-Indigenous.

"For some reason, I have had a lot of young, non-Indigenous women sign up already, so I don't need any more in that group," he said.

"But I do need more non-Indigenous men and more Aboriginal people of both sexes."

Mr Birch found words in the Northern Territory that he had not heard anywhere else in the country.

"And quite a lot of those words are actually brought in from Aboriginal languages or from the contact language that's developed here - the contact English that's developed," he said.

"Ways of saying things - 'You mob'. People use the word country in a different way, you know, 'on country'."

One word Mr Birch learned from Territory teenagers was "Buju" - an Aboriginal word originally meaning a certain part of a woman's body.

"But it's now come to be used as a word for 'spunk'. A hot guy or a hot chick sort of thing, by adolescents at school," he said.

"That's something that you don't find in other places."

Eleven universities across Australia have been collecting voices for the national database.

Every participant's voice has been recorded in identical conditions, from the size of the room to the strength of the lighting.

As well as multiple microphones to capture sound, cameras recorded a 3D image of each person as they spoke.

Mr Birch described the portable technology he set up at Charles Darwin University's Northern Institute in Darwin as "a black box about the size of a BBQ".

"We've got 12 of these set up and they are located in 12 different locations around the country. It's a multi-million-dollar project," he said.

To collect the voices the national database needs, Mr Birch will ask 200 Territorians to read the identical words and stories the other 800 participants have.

"That gives us the same set of words and the same story and the same sentences being spoken by over 800 people all around Australia," he said.

"We can compare very easily, how people sound."