The Use of American and Australian English

Critical review

O’Hanlon, R (2006). Australian Hip Hop: A Sociolinguistic Investigation. Australian Journal of linguistics Vol. 26, No. 2, October 2006, pp. 193-209

The Australian accent induces feelings of both fondness and embarrassment in a general Australian context. This polarity is the result of the ‘cultural cringe’ towards the accent itself in a movement to sound more British around the 1940s but also the large-scale desire for identity markers of Australian nationality respectively. As a result, the majority of Australian musical artists sing mostly with an American or Australian/American hybrid accent. This article is presenting research about the usage of American English in songs by Australian artists, and also how Australian hip hop artists as a minority in music, adhere to the use of Australian English.

In the article, O’Hanlon is asserting that Australian hip-hop artists reject the implementation of an American accent and in some instances are even using the most stereotypically Australian accent, which is the broad accent. O’Hanlon studied thirty songs of the Australian hip hop genre and thirty non hip hop songs, varying from pop to punk by different Australian artists. Every phoneme of these songs was examined in terms of the accent in applied to, with the exception of words such as ‘I’ and ‘my’ and words that contain regional differences in Australian English. Out of thirty AHH songs, only six possessed features of American English, and this was inconsistent throughout the song.

A handful of reasons are presented by the study to explain why this phenomenon occurs so consistently and obviously in Australian music, but not in Australian hip hop. Firstly, it is asserted that due to the a-melodic natu...

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...dence for O’Hanlon’s contention about the use of American and Australian English usage amongst different Australian artists and genres. It is thorough in its coverage of phonetic features of the English variations used in music and provides a wide pool of genres to draw conclusions from. One criticism is that there is no mention of how the use of Australian pronunciation by hip hop artists plays a role as an identity marker. The accent cements the solidarity between artists who are usually from and geared towards a certain demographic. There is no sociocultural context given about the genres described, as the demographic is not mentioned nor outlined. As both American and Australian hip hop has strong sociocultural and linguistic ties amongst their demographics, this could have provided a basis for a theory on why AHH rejects the American vernacular so obviously.