The Story of English: The Muvver Tongue: Aussies

[keirsey]

I have found the video series The Story of English one of my favorites. Simply Delightful.

Episode 7: The Muvver Tongue: Part II (Australian English)
Section I
Section II
Section III

Section IV

[Goodrum]

I should be able to see this tomorrow, but this:

This program covers the story of Cockneys, Australians, and Aborigines. The Cockney accent and slang comes from the east end of London and is considered working-class speech. The word, Cockney, comes from middle English and means cock's egg or runt. The characteristic sound of Cockney is to drop the leading "H" sound in words and to replace the "Th" sound with a "V" sound: Hello becomes 'ello and mother becomes muvver. Cockneys like to speak in rhyming slang, replacing words with a recognized, usually humorous, rhyming word or phrase: the word, wife, is replaced with "trouble and strife," the word, hat, is replaced with titfer, from tit for tat, the word, talk, is replaced with rabbit and pork, leading to the expression: rabbiting on, to describe someone who is speaking at length and emphatically about something. Cockneys also use back slang, which is to say words backwards:

Yes, that's what we do. I'm from "outback" isolated areas, "my" people still speak like this. I've always said there are still small pockets of timewarp populations.

Town and more, cities don't speak like this, well, it's all disappearing anyway, I've not heard it in Oz cities.

People around here for example, when they buy a meat pie will ask for some "dead horse" on it. Meaning tomato sauce, which I think is USA ketchup?

The communities I have come from have had the Aboriginal/cockney influences. Still do. Most children around here start off speaking really well, and as they mature, the native speak starts to creep in.

For some reason even years of travelling doesn't particularly rid you of it, different countries, urban living-it can still be there...

I should tape some of the local characters and post them up you tube, as examples, they would be okay, give permission, they are bits of entertainer, storytellers. Love working a crowd, world wide web would chuff them no end.

[charliebrown]

luverly juverly, I have wondered about this a lot...i.e how accents evolve. I'll definitely be watching this week-end. I'd love to know how Elizabethan English sounded and most of all what the ancient Romans sounded like when they spoke Latin. It boggles my mind to think that only 2000 years ago Italian and French didn't exist...?

[Goodrum]

What an interesting documentary, I'm guessing filmed in the 80's, but the farming-early footage/accents are still applicable, we are even more isolated/rural, they actually spoke quite well. And the horses are in conjunction with motor bikes.

That was fun.

[Goodrum]

North American English Dialects, Based on Pronunciation Patterns