Accent
Although Australia doesn’t have the regional accents of England or America, linguists have discovered that Adelaide residents can pick people as being from the Eastern states on the basis of their accents. Adelaidians will pronounce words such as dance, graph and plant with a long ‘a’ (‘darnce’, rather than to rhyme with pants, as in the Eastern states).As well, Adelaidians use more of a back tongue position to make the vowel sound in words such as pool (pronounced something like ‘pull’) and school (nothing like the grating ‘skew-ell’ heard in the Eastern states). But as so few people leave the Eastern states to come to South Australia—as opposed to the flood going in the other direction—this is not a skill which is often called upon. [HV]