Mel CampbellIt always annoyed me the way Americans characterise the Australian "no" as "naur". I was like, "there's no fkn r on the end!"
I could only explain it to myself by imagining that they can only approximate the same sound in their rhotic accents by adding an r in?
But this video has actually made it make sense to me! Younger Australians, particularly, are actually moving away from a traditional "no" diphthong glide in the "GOAT vowel" towards a "bunched r"
which is: rather than the traditional Australian tongue glide of 'up and forward', younger speakers are gliding 'down and forward', which rhoticises the glide
"They're taking the General Australian GOAT diphthong and making it even more Aussie"
I still didn't believe this until the video shows really nicely isolated clips of Australian speakers doing it, and I'm forced to accept that it is rhoticised
I think maybe I'm too old to have picked up the bunched r? Maybe I still have a "general Australian accent"?
I mean, I still try to distinguish between similar-sounding words like "law" and "lore"
(there's a specific example that I actually used to practise before a lecture that included it, but I can't remember now what it was)
When I participated in the #AusTalk regional accent research project, I was told that I had quite a 'neutral' accent
Linguistics kind of breaks my brain but I love being able to explain these things that I can intuitively hear
