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REVEALED: The most annoying accents in the world

The results you didn’t know you needed are in, with a global survey revealing which accents are considered the most appealing and most annoying to men and women. 300 men and women were asked by The Knowledge Academy to listen to five minutes of the same script recorded by English-speakers. The researchers were able to determine which accents were preferred or disliked based off how long each participant were able to listen to the audio before they turned it off. Whether it comes as a surprise to you or not, American accents were deemed the most annoying by men and women with men turning the recording off after just one minute and 26 seconds and women choosing to switch off after one minute and 17 seconds. Irish accents were interestingly enough voted the most appealing among women, with the female participants choosing to listen for four minutes and 30 seconds. Men however preferred a Scottish accent by choosing to listen for around four minutes and 35 seconds. Women ruled South African accents as the second most annoying, with an average of one minute and 44 seconds listening time. Canadian accents among men came second with a listening time of one minute and 42 seconds. Women seemed to find Kiwi accents annoying as well, landing third with a listening time of two minutes and seven seconds. Wales come in at second place on the most annoying. Unfortunately, it seems the world does not deem Australian accents as appealing as we may have though, coming fourth on the women's list. The results are as follows: Most Annoying Women's English Accents <ol> <li>USA – one minute and 26 seconds</li> <li>South Africa –one minute and 44 seconds</li> <li>New Zealand – two minutes and seven seconds</li> <li>Australia – two minutes and 29 seconds</li> <li>Wales – two minutes and 44 seconds</li> <li>England – two minutes and 56 seconds</li> <li>Canada – three minutes and 12 seconds</li> <li>Scotland – three minutes and 38 seconds</li> <li>Northern Ireland – four minutes and two seconds</li> <li>Ireland – four minutes, 32 seconds</li> </ol> Most Annoying Men's English Accents <ol> <li>USA – one minute and 17 seconds</li> <li>Canada – one minute and 42 seconds</li> <li>Wales – two minutes and 11 seconds</li> <li>South Africa – two minutes and 27 seconds</li> <li>Northern Ireland – two minutes and 43 seconds</li> <li>England – two minutes and 51 seconds</li> <li>New Zealand – three minutes and 15 seconds</li> <li>Australia – three minutes and 34 seconds</li> <li>Ireland – four minutes and 27 seconds</li> <li>Scotland – 4 minutes, 35 seconds</li> </ol>

Cruising

Woman develops new accent overnight

Though Angie Yen has never been to Ireland or any immediate family from there, the Brisbane dentist claims to have woken up one day with an Irish accent. The 27-year-old believes she has foreign accent syndrome, a isolating and uncommon speech disorder. What is foreign accent syndrome? The condition, typically triggered by a head injury, stroke, or brain damage, impairs a person’s ability to control the muscles used to produce speech. The result of this is that people can appear to develop what sounds like a foreign accent overnight - despite never speaking with that accent before, nor mixing with people who do or spending time abroad. But, Angie hasn’t suffered a stroke, head injury, or brain damage, so experts say her case isn’t so simple. Instead, the accent change came about following tonsil surgery. “I didn’t have any issues with talking or eating or anything like that, if anything the throat was ust very, very sore,” she told 7NEWS.com.au. “Everything was normal, I was just on painkillers, so I was living life normally. There was nothing out of the ordinary.” Ten days after the surgery, while singing in the shower hours before a job interview, she noticed something strange. “I was singing notes that I didn’t think I could hit before, even though my throat was quite sore. I knew something wasn’t right.” When she spoke, her voice didn’t sound like hers either. “I was very shocked … I called up one of my friends who had travelled all over the world and asked where my accent is from. He said - you sound like you’re Irish,” she said. While she hasn’t been formally diagnosed with the condition, her primary doctor says her symptoms sound like they match. “He referred me to get some scans for an MRI and also some blood tests to rule out anything underlying that could be going on,” Angie said. The thing that has Angie, her doctors, and experts baffled is that the change didn’t occur until 10 days after surgery. Spreading awareness Though Angie has led a very private life, she has decided to document her journey spreading awareness about the condition on TikTok. “I felt that somewhere in the world someone might wake up with this one day and just feel as lost, alone, and isolated as I am,” she said. “I hope by spreading awareness and letting people know that this is a serious health issue, that eventually we can encourage people to get the help they need and take it seriously.” Mixed accents While most commenters said Angie sounds Irish, there has been a mixed response. “I’ve also gotten Canadian, American, Jamaican, British, New Zealand - all over the world,” she said. “And most countries I’ve never been to. It’s very, very bizarre.” That’s not too uncommon for those with foreign accent syndrome, according to Lyndsey Nickels, a Professor of Cognitive Science at Macquarie University. “People with foreign accent syndrome don’t speak with all the features of a foreign accent, but there are enough things about the way they speak to make it seem as though they have a different accent,” Nickels told 7NEWS.com.au. “Different listeners may have different opinions about what the accent is because the features usually don’t clearly match a single accent.” Nickels confirmed the disorder is thought to be caused by brain damage which can make “moving or coordinating the muscles that we use to produce speech” more difficult. “This causes inaccuracies in the speech, sounds with vowels being particularly vulnerable,” she said. Since the condition is so rare, many people - including some doctors - accuse sufferers of faking it. Speech pathologists can help those with the condition to improve speech muscle movement and coordination to regain accuracy in their speech. Image credit: 7NEWS

Mind

Don’t be afraid to pass your first language, and accent, to your kids. It could be their superpower

Australia is a multicultural society. There are different traditions, cultures, accents and languages all over the country. The latest Census data show almost 30% of Australians speak a language other than English, or English and another language, at home. In our latest survey, we have had responses from 281 multilingual families across Australia, who speak a variety of languages at home. They include Arabic, Vietnamese, Mandarin, Teo Chew and Spanish. We found many first-generation migrant parents are hesitant to pass on their first language to their children. This is because they believe a different language at home will give their children a foreign accent. Yet some parents also feel if they speak English to their children, their children will pick up their own accented English. This can leave some parents in somewhat of a catch-22, feeling that no matter what, their children will be faced with the same discrimination as them. But it’s important to speak to your children in your own language, and your own accent. By being exposed to multiple ways of communicating, children learn multiple ways of thinking. They learn to understand that everyone plays different roles, has different identities; and that others may speak or look different. Bias against foreign languages Research suggests people are highly biased in their preferences for certain accents and languages. According to the linguistic stereotyping hypothesis, hearing just a few seconds of an accent associated with a lower-prestige group can activate a host of associations. Hearing a stereotypical “foreign accent”, for example, can lead people to immediately think of that person as being uneducated, inarticulate or untrustworthy. These kinds of biases develop early in life. In a 2009 study, five-year-old children chose to be friends with native speakers of their native language rather than those who spoke a foreign language or had an accent. One hypothesis is that this is due to our broader survival mechanism. Babies learn early to tune in more to the voice of their caregiver rather than a stranger’s voice. This means they are better able to detect when they are in a dangerous situation. However, over time, these stranger-danger associations become stereotypes, which can lead us to hear or see what we expect. When we get older, we need to unlearn our biases that once kept us safe to become more accepting of others.In Australia, there is systematic discrimination towards speakers of Australian Aboriginal English, as well as towards speakers of “ethnolects”, which are a way of speaking characteristic of a particular ethnic group — such as Greek, Italian or Lebanese. <a href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/arabian-family-portrait-park-792334939" class="source"></a>When people hear these accents, they may think that person does not speak English well. But having an accent is special: it signals you are multilingual and you have the experience of having grown up with multiple cultural influences. Accentuate the positive Many of the parents we surveyed felt hesitant to speak multiple languages at home, or felt their efforts were not being supported at school. One parent told us: <blockquote> Instead of helping her (my daughter) develop the language, all primary teachers assessed her language in comparison with the monolinguals and demanded to cut the other languages “to improve” the school language. I would not have dared to experiment here in Australia with the kid’s second language. The peer pressure, the teacher’s pressure and the lack of language schools are main factors. </blockquote> But over the centuries, some of the world’s brightest people, such as author Joseph Conrad spoke with a strong accent. Many others, such as Vladimir Nabokov, Gustavo Pérez-Firmat and Eva Hoffman (who wrote Lost in Translation in her second language) harnessed the benefits of being bilingual to produce astounding literary works, drawing on the different “voices” in their heads to act out different characters. In this way, a second language can be a superpower. Children who can speak several languages tend to have higher levels of empathy. They also find it easier to learn languages later in life. Multilingual exposure facilitates interpersonal understanding among babies and young children. This social advantage appears to emerge from merely being exposed to multiple languages, rather than being bilingual per se. Being multilingual is also an amazing workout for the brain: speaking multiple languages throughout your life can help delay the onset of dementia and cognitive decline. Parents’ confidence translates to children Research shows migrant parents who feel pressured to speak to their children in their non-native language feel less secure in their role as parents. But if they feel supported in using their first language, they feel more confident as parents, which in turn has a positive effect on children’s well-being. We found migrant parents who do raise their children in more than one language report feeling good about passing on their culture to their children, and feel they have given them an advantage in life. They also feel as though their children are more connected to their extended family. So, what could you do? Here are some ways you could help your children keep their native language, and accent, alive: <ul> <li> check out your local library or BorrowBox for books or audiobooks in different languages </li> <li> connect with other multilingual families on social media for virtual or face-to-face playdates </li> <li> schedule video chats with grandparents and extended family members. Encourage them to speak their language with your child </li> <li> find out if your child’s preschool has a program for learning a new language, or check out Little Multilingual Minds. If your child is older, encourage them to take up a language in primary or high school. It’s never too late. </li> </ul> One parent shared their strategy for helping their child speak in different languages and accents: <blockquote> I play games with accents, one child is learning French, the other Italian, so I play games with them about the pronunciation of words and get them to teach me words in the language they are learning and emphasise the accent. </blockquote> We hope linguistic diversity becomes the status quo. This way, all children will gain cultural awareness and sensitivity. They will become more attuned to their evolving identities, and accept others may have identities different to their own. Written by Chloé Diskin-Holdaway and Paola Escudero. This article first appeared on <a href="https://theconversation.com/dont-be-afraid-to-pass-your-first-language-and-accent-to-your-kids-it-could-be-their-superpower-143093">The Conversation</a>.

Mind

Why we should love our Aussie accent

Earlier this year, a US contestant on TV’s The Bachelor <a href="https://www.news.com.au/entertainment/tv/reality-tv/the-bachelor/us-bachelor-contestant-send-sparks-internet-lunacy-with-fake-aussie-accent/news-story/3b03d573c31c435c4869ae00cdfa4067">faked</a> an Australian accent to stand out. It wasn’t a great accent. Yanks aren’t great at doing Australian English. But to be fair, when it comes to Americans and the Australian accent, we can, and do, draw on the words of “Australia’s nightingale” Dame Nellie Melba: “<a href="https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/1143363">sing’em muck</a>”. A steady media diet of Paul Hogan and Steve Irwin types has left them with some funny ideas about how we Aussies talk. Stone the crows, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shrimp_on_the_barbie">Paul</a>, you want me to throw another “what” on the barbie? We say it’s time we educate our Yank mates. First step, let’s stop spreading nonsense about how lazy our accents are and all these cultural cringe-tinged myths. <h2>Flies, booze and linguistic turncoats: public figures and our ‘lazy’ accent</h2> In the opening years of the colony, it might surprise you to know that many saw the Aussie accent as a good thing — “pure” in the words of a few observers (and purity here doesn’t mean the absence of “foul language”, but rather the lack of regional characteristics). A Tasmanian correspondent, Sam McBurney, <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/07268602.2014.875454?src=recsys&journalCode=cajl20">wrote</a> in the Argus in April 1886: <blockquote> There were no peculiarities in the colonies, but a general tendency to speak a pure English. </blockquote> Alas, it was also around this time that the commentary started to change — enter those fanciful tales that <a href="https://catalogue.nla.gov.au/Record/1988059">link</a> our accent to our half-open mouths, the flies, the climate, the pollen, our dental hygiene, alcohol consumption, and even our day-to-day conversations with Chinese migrants. Sadly, Australian public figures are often the purveyors of these furphies. In the early 20th-century, Dame Nellie Melba <a href="https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/28080863">lambasted</a> the accent, referring to our “twisted vowels” and “distortions”, and claimed the <blockquote> …general tendency to dawdle and slouch along … lies at the heart of the Australian accent. </blockquote> In his 1939 contribution to the book <a href="https://trove.nla.gov.au/work/27473790?selectedversion=NBD2536590">Some Australians Take Stock</a>, T.S. Dorsch suggested the Australian accent might arise from “a species of national sloth”. And at the end of last year, Australian New York Times columnist Julia Baird <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/15/opinion/australian-accents-the-good-place.html">joined</a> the public chorus lamenting the “laziness” of the accent. “Lazy” and “slovenly” have long been the go-to adjectives for haters of the Australian accent. Language researcher Janice Reeve <a href="https://books.google.com.au/books/about/Australian_English.html?id=TDTWAAAAMAAJ&redir_esc=y">found</a> them to be the two most common adjectives used in letters to the ABC Weekly from 1939-1959. Public figures aren’t helping our image by spreading this nonsense about the Aussie accent overseas. The ideas don’t stand up to scrutiny. <h2>What does it even mean to have a ‘lazy’ accent?</h2> Our views of accents are arbitrary social evaluations rather than intrinsic facts, and we base them on our knowledge and experience of the people who lie behind the accents. So, when you call an accent lazy, what you’re really saying is that someone is lazy. But who? The answer is often racist, classist, sexist, and, well, lazy. Want proof? Britons <a href="https://trove.nla.gov.au/work/6092074">asked</a> to evaluate British accents rated the posh accents (those closer to the Queen’s English) as the most prestigious, and the urban accents as least prestigious. When Americans rated the same accents, the results got confusing. Among other things, urban dialects no longer came in at the bottom of the list, and Americans in these studies even suggested that a Glasgow English speaker was from Mexico, and a Welsh English speaker was Norwegian. And what about these sounds often cited as “lazy”? Baird (among others) mentions “t” becoming “d” (“impordant”) and the disappearance of “l” in the iconic “Straya”. The first thing to point out is that the modification and disappearance of these sounds aren’t distinctively Australian. They’re not even just an English thing but make up the potpourri of linguistic changes that have been going on for centuries — in all languages. Next, to be technical, the “t” isn’t becoming a “d” but rather a short, rapid touching of the tongue against the bump behind the teeth, known as a “tap”. It’s rather like an “r” sound. This change is widespread in global English, including British and American varieties. If you condemn it, you must also condemn those early English speakers who turned “pottage” into “poddash” and finally into modern English “porridge”. And don’t these “disappearing” sounds like the “l” get up people’s noses? They certainly did in the 17th century, when “l” dropped from words like “walk” and “talk”. “Negligentius” is how Wallis described the modern pronunciations “wawk” and “tawk”. He would have written “slovenly” but he chose to write his 1653 book on the <a href="https://books.google.com.au/books?id=tEEVAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA74&dq=wallis++Grammatica+linguae+Anglicanae+negligentius&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwj-0-zMrrTgAhXVWisKHaznDawQ6AEIOjAD#v=onepage&q=negligentius&f=false">grammar</a> of English in Latin because English wasn’t up to the task. Are such sound deletions “lazy”? A more honest approach to such “laziness” might see us <a href="https://theconversation.com/haitch-or-aitch-how-a-humble-letter-was-held-hostage-by-historical-haughtiness-97184">reinsert</a> the “k” in words like “knight”, “knee” and “knot” (lost sometime during the 17th-century). But why stop there? We might reinstate “r” throughout Australian English in “word”, “part” and “far”. But then we’d be opening ourselves up to complaints about the Americanisation of Australian English. After all, the Americans maintained the “r” in these words where the British and Australian varieties lost them in the 17th and 18th centuries. <h2>Learning to love the Aussie accent</h2> If you’d like to “improve” the pronunciation of others, research shows this is the wrong way to do it. In the first instance, it implies people aren’t aware that some accents are more valued than others in different contexts. And it downplays our dynamic ability to change our accents to suit our circumstances and goals. For instance, much gets made of Bob Hawke’s “broad” Australian accent, whereas a closer <a href="https://benjamins.com/catalog/veaw.g26">examination</a> of his accent sees him speaking “general” or even “cultivated” in formal contexts (his Boyer lectures). In the US, Barack Obama is also a dynamic accent shifter, but his standard English accent has been met with snide observations that he is “<a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0378216609001465">well-spoken</a>” (leaving one to wonder, well, why shouldn’t he be?). In the second instance, openly negative attitudes toward less socially valued accents in the classroom often lead to shame, resentment, and even hostility toward language activities. The outcomes can be <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/second-dialect-acquisition/E5C875B45376713E39FA2B5C18FD2382">catastrophic</a>, with consequences well beyond poor school performance. In fact, this led the Norwegian Ministry of Education to <a href="https://trove.nla.gov.au/work/6092074">ban</a> classroom attempts to change accents in 1878. So, there’s no substance to the view the Australian accent is “lazy”. If you’re promoting it, then in the wise words of American “philosopher” Jeffrey Lebowski, “that’s just, like, your opinion, man”. And it’s an opinion that is neither helping the view of Aussies overseas nor is it helping the people it proposes to help. So let’s learn to love our Aussie accents in 2019 in all forms, posh, broad, ethnic, Aboriginal — and by this we mean love the people who use them.<img style="border: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; margin: 0 !important; max-height: 1px !important; max-width: 1px !important; min-height: 1px !important; min-width: 1px !important; opacity: 0 !important; outline: none !important; padding: 0 !important; text-shadow: none !important;" src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/111753/count.gif?distributor=republish-lightbox-basic" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" /> Written by Howard Manns, Lecturer in Linguistics, Monash University and Kate Burridge, Professor of Linguistics, Monash University. Republished with permission of <a rel="noopener" href="https://theconversation.com/oi-were-not-lazy-yarners-so-lets-kill-the-cringe-and-love-our-aussie-accent-s-111753" target="_blank">The Conversation</a>.

Mind

The world's sexiest accent has been revealed

When it comes to accents, is Aussie among the world’s sexiest? Apparently so, according to a new global survey. Travel media company Big 7 Travel polled its readers across the globe on the world’s sexiest accent – and an unexpected candidate has come out on top of the list. The “outrageously charming” New Zealand has taken the crown as the world’s sexiest accent, beating out other accents from over 7,000 languages. “The ‘Newzild’ dialect is outrageously charming. The sexiest accent in the world? It’s official,” said the website. “To a novice ear, the New Zealand accent might sound just like the Australian accent.” Despite this, Australian only came in fifth. “Pronouncing words long and slow – and often skipping the ends of them completely – is a real turn on apparently.” Other accents that made the top ten were South African, Irish, Italian, Scottish, French, Spanish, South USA and Brazilian Portuguese. Different variations of the British accent also made the top 50, including Queen’s English at number 12, Mancunian at #18, Geordie at #41 and Welsh at #45. A number of American accents were also found to be popular, with the Boston accent taking the 28th spot and the “fast and hypernasal” New York coming in at number 44. See the full list of the top 50 sexiest accents <a href="https://bigseventravel.com/2019/04/worlds-sexiest-accent/">here</a>.

Mind

Meghan Markle accused of putting on a British accent

Meghan Markle is seeing the wrong man if she wants to avoid the public eye, but a new story emerging from the UK has shown just how ridiculous this scrutiny can be. <a href="https://www.mirror.co.uk/" target="_blank">The Mirror reports</a> that Markle has been accused of putting on a British accent in public with her pronunciation of the word ‘scone’ on a recent trip to Scotland. Prince Harry and Meghan greeted the masses during their trip up north, where one of the crowd members, Carolyn Chisholm, had prepared some potato scones for the couple. But Chisholm’s mother was not impressed by the Suits actor’s pronunciation. "[Meghan] gave them to her aide, saying they were 'scones,'" said Lynda Clark, 70, noting that Meghan pronounced the word with a short "o," to rhyme with "gone." Lynda added, "The correct pronunciation is ' scone'" said with a long "o," to rhyme with bone." What do you think?

News

Why Australians have fewer accents than other countries

There is clearly some variation in the way Australians speak, but for a big country it is strange the English-Australian accent hasn’t developed strong regional roots. The answer, say University of Melbourne experts, is less to do with geography and more to do with history. Australians have a long history of wanting to retain their British roots and ‘fit-in’ together – but technology also plays a part; access to a globalised media is continuing to smooth out what small differences there are. Senior voice lecturer at the Victorian College of the Arts, Leith McPherson says language is both a way to merge and differentiate yourself from social groups. “All accents are constantly changing but some are changing at a glacial rate because of their isolation,’’ she says. “In Australia, there just hasn’t been enough time or isolation in the 229 years since colonisation began for accents to become a location specific thing.” As well as being a younger country than the United States in terms of white settlement, an extra influence on the evolution of the Australian accent comes as a result of children. Dr Debbie Loakes, a phonetics expert at the School of Language and Linguistics, says the Australian accent levelled out very quickly after British colonisation, and experts believe that it was predominantly formed by children. Children, Dr Loakes says, are especially influenced by the way others speak, especially their fellow children which means they are more likely to all sound alike. “There’s a lot of push and pull as to whether or not you adopt the way someone else speaks,” says Dr Loakes. “Initially there would have been a lot of English accents coming together in the early years, and mainstream Australian English is thought to have its origins in the interactions between second generation children whose accents are thought to have “levelled out”. Just like one big melting pot, it started us off with relatively little variation in accent.” While indigenous Australians had developed over 250 different languages at the time of European colonisation, non-indigenous Australians simply haven’t been around long enough to develop regional accents. And as an English-speaking immigrant population, it was their common language that bound them together. “Australian accents instead tend to be more connected to social groups than geography. You adopt the accent of the group you want to blend with,” says Ms McPherson. Ms McPherson is well known for her work as a dialectic coach in the theatre and on films like Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit trilogy, which used J.R.R. Tolkien’s created languages. “One of the weird things that I do in my life is work with made-up languages, like Elvish or Dwarvish. But languages take time and regular use to become real and a population will change the way a language is used over time. That goes the same way for accents.” “So there is a sense that European Australians were, by choice or by necessity, creating a new world together. And in this new world, as in any population anywhere, you develop a cultural currency within the language,” says Ms McPherson. Then there’s the somewhat dated historical link to the Mother Country. “If you want to hang on to your British identity as my grandparents on my mother’s side did, they were Anglophiles, it was considered that people who spoke “correctly” were on the Received Pronunciation, or southern British, end of the Australian spectrum. And that has had a huge influence.’’ She says many of the people who arrived in Australia with other accents weren’t here by choice – circumstance led to it – so for the most part people were willing and wanting to leave their past behind. “More recently American influences are coming into the Australian accent much more so than British. So if you listen to Australian accent recordings from the 1950s, they are quite different, much more British than the average accent that you hear today,” she says. Professor John Hajek, a linguist from the School of Languages and Linguistics, says variations in Australian accents tend to reflect presumed social differences, not regional ones. “When you listen to an Australian it’s much harder to identify what their regional origin might be, but we’re very good at picking out what we assume to be the social characteristics of a speaker.” So is there an element of snobbery there? “Until the 1970s the cultivated Australian accent that was very common. It was the sort of accent you aimed for if you did speech and drama. It was meant to show you were cultivated, educated, and of high social status,” says Professor Hajek. “There was a lot of time spent coaching people, so if you talk to your mothers and your grandmothers, they will often talk to you about how they had elocution lessons, to make them sound more refined. But that has progressively disappeared and it has become quite unusual now.’’ Interestingly, Professor Hajek says the proportion of people who might identify as having a very broad Australian accent is also dropping. And that’s a direct result of mass media as well as mass university education. So although we all sound similar, there are variations – but for how much longer? “Linguists once talked about a three-way split in the Australian accent between broad Australian, general Australian and cultivated Australian, but even that is falling away now.” Written by Louise Bennet. Republished with permission of <a href="https://pursuit.unimelb.edu.au/" target="_blank">Pursuit</a>. Read the <a href="https://pursuit.unimelb.edu.au/articles/why-doesn-t-modern-australia-have-diverse-regional-accents" target="_blank">original article</a>. Image credit: Kath & Kim/ABC.

Books

Nicole Kidman wants to use her Australian accent in Hollywood

Nicole Kidman is demanding more roles where she can use her Australian accent from Hollywood – as well as more parts where she can show off her comedic chops. The Australian actress touched down in Sydney on Monday night to attend the premiere of season two of her new television drama, Top of the Lake, at the Sydney Opera House. Kidman loved using her Aussie accent in Jane Campion’s latest project and wants to keep using it. "In my next film [The Upside] I got to use my own accent again, something I want to do more of," She told journalists at the event. "I said, 'I think she'd be better as an Australian' and Kevin Hart and Bryan Cranston looked at me weirdly, as the role was written as an American, but [producer] Harvey Weinstein said, 'Yep, she's Australian,” the actress said at the premiere. The queen of drama also spoke about how she wants to try some comedy roles. "They always say I’m not funny," she said. "So I would love to be able to do a comedy. I never get offered them. I’m always offered dramas. But, you know, as I keep saying, at this stage in my life, I am so up for anything." It seems Kidman is also keen to work back in Australia. "I would like to. I love being here and being a part of this industry. I love being able to use my own accent," she said.

Movies

Nicole Kidman wants to use her Australian accent in Hollywood

Movies

Using Aussie slang makes people more likable

Using Aussie slang will make you more likable to fellow Australians. But only if your accent if fair dinkum. Research from Australian National University has found the use of slang words ending in “ie” or “o” increases the likelihood of an Australian finding you likeable. Dr Even Kidd, says his team was interested in the social effects of these particular kinds of slang, saying, “These terms are ironically called hypocoristics which is a very long name for a very short words. These are words like 'truckie' for truck driver, 'uggies' for ugg boots, 'ambo' for ambulance drivers and things like that.” In the study participants were introduced to an actor, who would use either the shortened slang or the normal terms in their conversation. After the interaction, participants were asked to rate each actor according to their “likeability”. “What we found is that when the actor used the slang words, the participant likes them more after the experiment finished than if they didn't use them,” Dr Kidd said. The research also found that accent was equally as important in terms of influencing the result, but interestingly, gender and race didn’t seem to have a bearing. “Initially we used what you might think of as prototypical Australian, so white Caucasian Australians and we wanted to see if there was an effect of gender on that,” Dr Kidd said. “We found that [gender] didn't have any effect, we still found this likeability effect in general. Then what we did was [get] a person of Asian background who spoke with an Australian accent, but also in another condition pretended to have a different accent. “What we found was that when she spoke with an Australian accent we found the same likeability effect for her, but we didn't find it when she spoke in a foreign accent.” This research is part of a series of studies examining generational change in the way Australians use slang words. The research has found older Australians are more likely to shorten words with an “ie” sound or an “o”, while younger Australians are more likely to clip words to the first one or two syllables and add an “s” sound. We’ve included a list of our 10 favourite Australian slang words below. And, in case you can’t get enough Australiana, <a href="/finance/money-banking/2015/12/20-aussie-suburbs-with-odd-names/" target="_blank">this article shows 20 oddly-named Aussie suburbs</a>. Favourite Australian Slang terms: <ul> <li>Arvo: afternoon</li> <li>Barbie: barbeque</li> <li>Bottle-O: bottle shop, liquor store</li> <li>Chockers: very full</li> <li>Esky: cooler, insulated food and drink container</li> <li>Fair Dinkum: true, real, genuine</li> <li>Grommet: young surfer</li> <li>Mozzie: mosquito</li> <li>Ripper: really great</li> <li>Sickie: sick day</li> </ul> Related links: <a href="/travel/domestic-travel/2016/03/national-dish-of-australia/">What is Australia’s national dish?</a> <a href="/travel/domestic-travel/2016/03/experience-turtle-nesting-season-in-northern-territory/">Experience turtle nesting season in NT</a> <a href="/travel/domestic-travel/2016/03/mob-of-kangaroos-confront-cyclist/">Mob of kangaroos confront cyclist</a>

Domestic Travel

English overtakes French as the world’s sexiest accent

The French have long held the position as masters of love but they may have just lost their place for sexist accent in the world.A Time Out Global Dating survey of 11,000 people in 24 cities have chosen the British accent as the most attractive one. It was followed by the American, Irish and our very own Aussie accent. In fact, French was only chosen by 7.7 per cent people, coming in at fifth place.However, all was not lost as Paris ranked as the city with the best dating scene. This was followed by Melbourne, Kuala Lumpur, Beijing, Chicago and London.The study also asked respondents of their outlook in love. Sydneysiders were the happiest singles with 31 per cent declaring themselves “proudly single” while in the Big Apple, the opposite was true. The survey found 45 per cent of New Yorkers said they were “sad to be single.”Technology was important in the modern day dating scene, with 58 per cent admitting to sussing out a date on social media first. Related Links:<a href="http://oversixty.com.au/lifestyle/dating/2014/11/falling-in-love-over-85-cuisines/" target="_blank">Read about how an Over60 communtiy fell in love over 85 cuisines</a><a href="http://oversixty.com.au/lifestyle/dating/2015/01/what-men-over-60-want/" target="_blank">Find out what men over 60 want</a><a href="http://oversixty.com.au/lifestyle/dating/2014/11/what-over-60-women-want/" target="_blank">Find out what over-60 women want</a>

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