Okay I admit it, I've checked myself and I've sounded like Kath and Kim a couple of times because I've been lazy with my speech. All depends on what kind of school you were educated at.
chuckle. Relaxed "at home" style chat is much less formal and rather more blunt than formal chat. Especially between countries (ruefully...). I've fallen into that mistake once or twice.
Interesting that you are defining accent in terms of education. Here education induced accent differences are down to money and/or region.
Re the Tony Abbot video, I just listened to the accent(s) and while I could hear they were of different flavours they all sounded Aussie more than anything else. And I couldn't be sure any differences I heard weren't down to the individual voices of the women - timbre, pitch, that sort of thing. If one of them had been a Kiwi, I doubt I'd have spotted it on such short clips of each woman. I think I could spot some of the background ethnic accents.
Loved the 21 accents! How were the Aussie ones? I was impressed by the English ones.
I'm beginning to suspect that I spot the accents that have a big non-British input. And that means Dutch in South Africa, and French and Spanish in Southern America, at a guess. I could hear the differences in the accents, but I couldn't tell you which side of the border the Northern Americans and Canadians were, or which side of the Tasman Sea an accent belonged. It's purely a lack of familiarity. Interesting that in both cases (Kiwis' and and Canadians') it is I think an increase of Scots in the accent I'm finding difficult to hear.
My mother thinks my speech is different since being in the country but it's the slang I use rather than a thicker accent. (I tend to use 'reckon' a lot rather than 'I think' and I tend to say 'yeah' and 'right' rather than 'Yes' and 'okay' I do check myself when i go to Melbourne ........I dont' know why I do that.
I think if you spend a long time in a region, your accent will change towards the accent of that region, and Mums will spot that. I suspect too that the different habits of speech are perhaps the beginnings of dialects and reflect our lives. In a way, our own individual way of speaking is our personal signature.
