About the voices

The accents come from research on how Australians actually speak, not from a stage twang.

What the research says

Australian English changes surprisingly little from place to place. The biggest difference is social, on a scale linguists call Broad, General and Cultivated, and it shifts with age, background and attitude. Small regional signals sit on top of that: a few vowels, how fast people talk, and local words.

• Victoria: the el and al merger, where celery sounds like salary. We write it into the Melbourne scripts as spelling, and leave it out of country Victoria.
• South Australia: the long "ah" in dance, chance and plant, a softer L, and a slower pace.
• Queensland: the "eh" tag, "but" on the end of a sentence, and centring vowels in here and there.
• Western Australia: fuller two part vowels in beer and fear, and a softened L.
• Tasmania: the short flat "a" in dance and castle, and pace that varies a lot by age.
• The Northern Territory and the ACT have no documented accent of their own, so those characters lean on vocabulary, climate and attitude.

Where it comes from

• The Australian Voices project (Macquarie University, Felicity Cox and Sallyanne Palethorpe), theaustralianvoices.com
• The Conversation, Manns and Cox, on telling a Victorian from a Queenslander
• SBS, on why Australia has few regional accents (Loakes and Hajek), and on speech rate across cities
• Sydney Speaks (ANU, James Grama) and Western Sydney University research on Sydney speech
• Mitchell and Delbridge (1965) and Harrington, Cox and Evans (1997) on Broad, General and Cultivated
• The AusTalk corpus, used for reference listening only

Thank you to the researchers whose work made this possible. Any mistakes in turning it into character voices are ours.

How we treat people

• Every character is a person with a job and a personality, not a stereotype of a community.
• The voices are original designs. None is a clone of a real person.
• No character speaks Kriol or Aboriginal English, and none jokes about First Nations people or culture. All the Northern Territory characters are non Indigenous Territorians.
• If we add First Nations voices one day, First Nations speakers and linguists will be commissioned and paid to make them.