formation of the australian accent

[oscartony]

an old school teacher told us if you put a baby in a room with a scot,welsh,english and irish person it would speak in an australian twang!!!

[joko]

no, its scouse.

[rojash]

In my experience, babies can't talk, so I suspect it would just go "gubba gubba gubba"

[mr_pointment]

what?straight away?good lord,i never knew that.lolololol

[Mudman]

How would it pick up an accent?.. There wouldn't be anything said in that room. Now, an Australian that's learned how not to talk in a room full of Brits... That'd be worth seeing.

[jno]

it's true that those accents went into the melting pot that produced Australian; but you could say they also produced New Zealand and American accents, which are different. Nice theory but I don't think it quite works.

[Grunty]

So rojash agrees with joko.

[:Ace:]

Tell your teacher to teach you real things which don't include talking babies

[ludwig]

I was always under the impression that the Australian accent was mostly based on cockney english, as that's where most of the original settlers/convicts were shipped from. (Think of someone saying g'day mate)

Similarly, the american accent is based on english west country.

[equalibra]

colonial accents emerged due to the mxture of european settlers trying to understand one another by slowing down their speech, drawing the words out in the accent where they came from, american accents change based on who settled where, irish and italian are the most prominent influences there.
Many of the regional british accents similarily are influenced by the arrival of the germanic and scandic invasions. the mystery is that the australian accent for example formed in less than 50 years.!