Strewth, the Strine way of speaking may be about to disappear

SYDNEY - For Australians slaving over the barbie, one piece of news yesterday made the prospect of burning the sausages pale into insignificance: the famous "Strine" accent is under threat and may be disappearing.

Speech scientists at Sydney's Macquarie University used the occasion of Australia Day to launch a website dedicated to Australian English and said the accent had altered radically since the 1960s, largely thanks to a far greater ethnic mix.

One scientist, Felicity Cox, also revealed that Australians had abandoned certain vowel sounds they once had in common with New Zealanders and as a result were sounding more like Californians.

The Tasman neighbours both used to pronounce "cat" as "cet", for instance, but younger Australians now pronounce it to rhyme with "dad".

Website theaustralianvoices.com tracks the way Australian English has evolved. It contains audio recordings from as far back as 1873. Regional differences can be explored by clicking on an interactive map.

Cox and her colleague, Sallyanne Palethorpe, have identified three sub-groups: standard Australian English, Australian Aboriginal English and ethnocultural Australian English.

Cox said the last category, which included, for example, Lebanese-Australian, was particularly interesting, as such accents were "an expression of ethnicity but ... still distinctly Australian".

The pair said that although the "Ocker" speech patterns, typical of Kath and Kim in their eponymous television series, had not disappeared entirely, they were increasingly rare, particularly in young people.

Cox said that multiculturalism, involving significant levels of immigration from non-English-speaking countries, had changed the way Australians think about the language.

In particular, the "cultivated" accent once prevalent on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation had virtually disappeared. Cox told the Sydney Morning Herald: "It used to be culturally advantageous to speak with a British accent. [But] language changed, just like culture."

While regional differences were muted in Australia, they emerged in the pronunciation of certain words.

In Western Australia, for example, "fear" was pronounced as if it had two syllables. In the eastern states, it had one, very short syllable.

In South Australia, "world" was pronounced as if the "l" were a vowel.

Because accents changed little after people reached their 20s, Cox said, their voices were like a time capsule of where and when they grew up.