I wish I had a dollar/pound or euro for every time someone asked me that question because I would have quite a fat piggy bank by now!.

Having an Australian accent seems to leave you open to all kinds of interpretations: Am I English?…or South African?…or, and here’s the most popular one, a New Zealander…?. It’s strange as the Aussie accent has a certain sound to it, but then so do those dialects of the Kiwi’s or South Africans and it’s all in the way we pronounce our vowels. But all the same, the differences are quite marked and yet so many people confuse them.

Here’s another example; Arnold comes from Belfast in Northern Ireland and is of Scottish ancestry. He speaks with an Ulster-Scots influence but you would be surprised as to how many people assume he has an Irish accent. And he is not Irish by any means. If you listen to the linguistic style of the Scottish and then to the Irish you can certainly hear the difference, Arnold is somewhere in between but more to the Scottish side. There are many different dialects spoken in Northern Ireland and I was amazed by that when I arrived and met different people in the different areas.

In Australia though the only people, to me, who have a different ‘ring’ to their speech are those who live in the rural areas; but country folk usually do speak differently to city and townsfolk. Arnold though reckons that Sydney people sound different to those from Victoria i.e in Melbourne they have that ‘Neighbours’ accent. Strange, as many of those actors in that show are from Sydney.

It just goes to show how people ‘hear’ differently to how we hear ourselves, but, vive la difference!.