THE MATTER OF ACCENT.

Marlborough Express, Volume XLIII, Issue 116, 14 May 1909, Page 2

THE MATTER OF ACCENT.

(By Frank Morton.)

Recently I met, for the thousandth time, one of those Australians who are for ever oddly insisting that there is "no such thing" as an Australian accent. I don't know why they worry about denying the obvious; but I suppose every man has his pet delusion. A trace of local colour in a man's speech is a delightful thing, so long as the colour is not harsh and raw. It is an old saying that the best English is spoken in "Dublin; but the best English in Dublin is pleasantly tinged with the characteristic tint of the disthressful country. The accent of the Scottish highlands, when the speaker is a man of any education, is often very pleasant. Australian accents differ. The Sydney accent is hard, and the Melbourne accent has an unpleasant burr. But the Brisbane accent is pleasing, and Adelaide and Tasmania have drawls that are not ungrateful to the ear. In Dunedin, since lit is well to speak of the country where we are—in Dunedin the predominant accent (where it does not lapse to absolute dialect) is rough but not forbidding. The Christen urch accent, with its rather Silly affectation of country-English of the afternoontea'variety, is tolerable. There is no definite accent in Wellington, where the English spoken is generally very good. In Auckland you find a sort of cross between Sydney's rasp and Hobart's drawl.

An absolutely new accent (new, I mean, in the sense of being unfamiliar) delights the cosmopolite, as a rare and curious iddue delights the collector of postage-stamps—if any such innocents remain under the moon, mooning. To-day, here in Wellington, I was talking to a good priest whose accent, both in English and French, puzzled and interested me. I said so. He smiled. "You see," he said, "I am from the Duchy of Luxembourg. We speak French and German and our own Luxembourgoise. I suppose that some of the quality of each gets into our inflection of any other tongue we experiment with." I only once met one foreigner (I hate that word) who spoke English quite without accent. He was not an American: he was a Dane. I myself have a sort of accent at odd moments, because it was once my fortune to live a good deal among Americans. There are many American accents, some charming; but the raw accent of the ordinary Massachusetts man is easily the ugliest in the world.