English Accents American Australian Pronunciation Differences
Hello! I’m Emma from mmmEnglish and in
this lesson, I found an American all the
way down here in Australia and I thought
that I’d use him to show you some of
the pronunciation differences between
Australian English and American English.
You don’t mind if I use you, Allan?
Use away!
How long have you been in Australia Allan?
Two weeks now.
Two weeks! And what do you think of it so far?
It’s beautiful. Yeah. Actually this is our
first rainy day but for most days it’s been
really, really nice out here in the west side.
Rainy days are good for filming actually!
Oh! That’s good, perfect day.
Hey, what’s one weird thing that
Australians say? Australians say a lot of
weird things with slang words. What kinds
of things have you heard that have kind
of just weirded you out?
Maybe if someone said, you know, “Go to the
boot and get some bush chooks and
we’ll crack a tinnie.” And you’re like, “I have no
idea what you’re talking about!”
Nobody knows what you’re talking about!
What he actually said was can you go to the car,
the back of the car, open it, get out a
can of beer and open the beer. Drink it.
And drink the beer. So we can drink beer.
Boot is actually not that weird, that’s just
you know, you have a different name in America, right?
We just call it a trunk.
A trunk. The back of the car in America is called a
trunk but here in Australia and in
the UK too it’s boot. Yes. You also say some
really weird things actually, this
morning you said to me “I’m going to go
and pet that horse out there.” and I
was like “what?” because pet is just like an animal in
Australia, like a dog or a cat. Right, right.
But you’re using it as a verb like you
would - like we say pat, pat the
animal and you say pet. Yeah, yeah pet.
Yeah. Pet the animal.
But my point is that even native English
speakers have, you know, sometimes we have
words or even pronunciation that we
don’t quite understand about each other
and you have to sort of piece the puzzle
together and that’s definitely what
we’ve been doing the last few days, right?
Since I met you. Definitely. Piecing it
together. Yeah right, piecing it together.
Figuring it out. I’m going to, I’ve got
some words actually written down here
that I want to, I want to test your
pronunciation on because I think that
the way that you say these words is
quite different to the way that we say
them here in Australia. So I want to test
that out and I want to demonstrate to
you guys what that actually, what it
looks like or what it sounds like. The
different - the difference between the
American accent and the Australian
accent. So the first one is this one, Allan.
How do you say this? That’s hot.
Hot. Hot. OK, so we would say hot. So
more like oh rather than ah. Yeah so it’s a
little bit different - that’s an easy one
to start with. What about this one?
Going to be very different. We say car. This one,
Car. Car. Car. So the main difference there
is that Allan pronounces the ‘r’ at the
end of this word. You say car. We use
the ‘r’, yes. And we just dropped that ‘r’
sound, it’s kind of silent. It’s just ah. Car.
Yeah! That’s like, that’s proper Australian
accent. Car. All right, what about
this one? Bottle. Bottle. Bottle. Now the
way that I say bottle is - with T’s. Yeah
but it’s not, actually, lots of
Australians have the same pronunciation
of these two T’s like, like you do and
often I say bottle as well. So you
instead of pronouncing that T, it’s like
a ’d' sound, like a lazy D sound. Bottle.
Bottle. Yeah. Bottle. Bottle. Yeah that’s
pretty good, it’s pretty close. But that’s one
similarity between the Australian accent
and the American accent - is this double T or
even just a single T in the middle of
words like a bottle of water. A bottle of
water. Yeah, like someone from the UK
would say a bottle of water - in a better
accent than me.
OK, how about this one? Burger.
I think the way he says this is hilarious!
We say burger but you pronounce this ‘u’
in a different way. Burger. Yes. Bur- Burger.
Burger. And I just say burger. OK!
Sometimes we’d drop the ‘a’ there, we’ll say
garage. Garage? Oh, like that’s
really, really soft. Yeah, sometimes it’s
garage or sometimes it’s just garage. So
the main difference between the American
and the Australian or the UK British
accent pronunciation of this word is
that we would put the stress on the
first syllable
and we would say ga-rage, garage.
And you would say garage so the stress
pattern is different for this word.
Garage. Garage.
OK. Bought. That is not
how you say that! Bought. Yes. Bought. It’s pretty
similar! Bought. Bought. Yeah it’s pretty similar.
Bought. What about this one, then? Daughter.
Daughter. Daughter.
Daughter or daughter. That’s another good
example of that ’t'. Daughter.
How about this one?
Aunt. Or aunt. But it’s mostly, I think you
hear people say aunt more. Aunt.
We say aunt. Aunt. My auntie. Do you say auntie?
No, we just say aunt. We don’t really use
auntie as much. OK so that’s quite
different! Aunt and aunt. How about this one?
Entreprenuer. OK so the main difference
there is in this last couple of
syllables. We say entrepreneur. Oh really?
Entrepreneur. Yeah. Now I don’t even know
how to say it! Entrepreneur. So you
kind of do two syllables at
the end here, where we just go entrepreneur or
entrepreneur. Entrepreneur.
Entrepreneur. That’s a weird word. Entrepreneur. What
about.. this is kind of related, this word.
Yeah. There’s niche or niche. What do you say?
I say niche but maybe I’ve been saying
it wrong for a while but I think people say
niche though. It’s your niche. Everyone, lots of
people in America say niche but everyone
outside of America says niche.
Is that true? Did you have to look that up? No that’s true!
I want to make sure I’m not the only one here.
It’s not just you! Lots of Americans say
niche and add a ’t' sound in there
but the rest of the world, the rest of
the English-speaking world, says niche.
Find your niche. Interesting, very interesting. OK.
Caramel. Sorry what?
Caramel. We’ll say caramel, caramel apple!
Caramel, caramel apple! Yeah.
Caramel. Yes it’s very different. Caramel. And I
don’t know why it’s caramel, but it’s
caramel or people will say it both ways.
It’s caramel or caramel. Yeah and even then,
- caramel - if you say caramel, you put
like a stronger stress on this third
syllable, don’t you? Caramel. Yeah -mel.
Caramel. OK this one.
Mobile.
Mobile. Mobile. Mobile.
Very different. It’s quite different. But this is like -
- you say it correctly. You would normally, you
would normally say just cell phone, right?
Yeah, we say cell phone. When
do you use this word? Like a mobile home, like
to move things. Yeah, not like a phone?
Right. Right because we would
use this for a phone. Even, well actually, I
jumped in the ocean with my mobile.
You did too! and I went to look for cell phones
and it’s like in Australia it’s not
really, they just always use mobile
phones so I was searching for what’s the best
cell phone plan and it’s not how they
say it. Oh like you were Google-ing that? Yeah yeah.
But if you said that to someone
here though, they’d know exactly what
you were talking about.
Cell phone, mobile phone. Right, right. But if you did say
mobile or what do you say? Mobile? Mobile.
Mobile. They’d be like ‘what?’. Actually
that’s like the petrol company. Yeah we
don’t use petrol either, we call it gas.
It’s just gas or gasoline. So these are like
loads of vocabulary differences between
American and Australian English. We’re
trying to focus on pronunciation but
there’s a whole other lesson in
vocabulary for sure! OK what about
this one? This one is one of my favorites!
It’s very simply said. Aluminium. Aluminium
is what we say but actually when I when
I looked this up, you guys spell it
differently - That’s why! Because I’m looking at it,
I’m like I don’t think that’s how we
spell it, right. You actually have changed
the spelling so instead of aluminium,
aluminium. You, you just write it
aluminum. Is that right? Aluminum. Yeah. Yeah.
Aluminum. Just the -um at the end.
Stop knocking that plant! Hey buddy!
OK how about this?
Leisure. Leisure. Leisure. Leisure.
But I can see why leisure, that would make
probably makes more sense but American
pronunciation, leisure, with the ‘r’ and
Australian pronunciation, leisure, bit
lazier.
Turmeric. Turmeric. Yeah turmeric.
Here, turmeric. Yeah, yeah. This is like - maybe I’m wrong but I
think I’ve called it turmeric for all that
I can remember. Don’t doubt yourself that’s
just totally how you -
Try not to doubt myself. Don’t doubt yourself in everything
you’ve known for thirty years!
Yeah yeah. But this is the spice, the yellow
spice that’s used a lot in Indian
cooking and Malaysian cooking. Very, very
tasty, delicious spice.
So are you kind of surprised by how many
differences there are or did you already
know about a lot of those differences
between American and Australian English?
I think I get surprised by something
almost every day!
That you’re here! Yeah it’s still very new
for you, isn’t it? Yeah,
It’s just pronunciation, it is very
different. Yes. Yeah, yeah. But it’s fun!
Yeah? Do you find the Australian accent easy
to understand or is it sometimes quite
difficult?
I think for the most part you can
understand it. There’s just, there’s that
I think the more harder things in
Australia is like using different words
for different meanings. Different
vocabulary, slang words and stuff like
that. Yes definitely.
Alright well if you would like to watch
any more videos about the difference
between American English, Australian
English, British English, I want you to go
and check out these two here that I’ve
just right on top of Allan right now.
Sorry about that
Allan but can you just hold these videos
for me? Right here. Yeah. Thank you that’s
perfect! If you would like to watch more
of these videos and get updates when I
release new videos, make sure that you
subscribe to my channel by clicking this
red button here and I will see you in
the next lesson. Thanks for joining us
and thanks Allan! Well you’re very welcome!
Thank you for having me. Bye for now!