Information about work, life and play in Regional Australia

Monday, September 17, 2007

Australian Regional Dialects - Harry Potter learns to speak South Australian



Photo: Daniel Radcliffe, aka Harry Potter

My whole family loves Harry Potter.

Back in June I put up an introductory post on Australia's regional dialects. How does this link to Harry Potter?

I see from a post on one of the Sydney Morning Herald's blogs that back in 2005 Daniel Radcliffe spent six months in Adelaide learning how to speak like a South Australian for his new film The December Boys.

When I mentioned this to my girls, youngest expressed surprise. She is so dialect deaf that she finds it hard to recognise an Australian accent!

In practice she can, of course. It's just that hears so many forms of English in her daily life that she does not distinguish between them. To really recognise differences, you have to be able to type them, to measure them against other things, and Clare simply does not worry about this.

I do and can. But my hearing, my understanding of phonetics, are not sufficiently clear to allow me to always accurately type differences.

So I was interested to read about the Harry Potter case. I also found the comments on the SMH blog post very interesting because they drew out some of the regional differences.

Introductory post. Next post.

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