Australians Sound Drunk All the Time Because Their Ancestors Were Drunk All the Time, Claims Communications Expert

Photo via Wikicommons

On Monday an Australian communications expert claimed his country's accent is the result of a "drunken slur" stemming from Australia's early settlers and their habit of being hammered all the time. This should surprise no one. It's a wonder this connection is only being made now, in 2015. For reference, here is a pitch-perfect impression of the Australian accent.

The expert, Dean Frenkel, is a lecturer in public speaking and communication at Victoria University (pronounced VIK-TOREE-UR UNI-VARSAH-TAYE). He made the claim in the Australian paper the Age. "The Australian alphabet cocktail was spiked by alcohol," he writes. "Our forefathers regularly got drunk together and through their frequent interactions unknowingly added an alcoholic slur to our national speech patterns. For the past two centuries, from generation to generation, drunken Aussie-speak continues to be taught by sober parents to their children."

Frenkel's piece isn't designed to insult so much as inform, and in it he calls on Australian schools to put more emphasis on linguistics. He also asks his fellow countrymen to stop it with the missing consonants and "lazily transform pronounce things as they're spelled. We add and abbreviate stuff."

Frenkel seems to agree, writing, "the communication skills of most average Americans would be just below that of Australia's best speakers."

But Frenkel believes there is hope for his country yet. "The holes in our education system reflect holes in our culture," he writes, calling for a fourth 'R'—rhetoric—to be added to the classroom culture alongside reading, writing, and arithmetic. Not doing so, he says, is costing the country not only some long overdue respect, but money. "Poor communication is evident among all sectors of Australian society and the annual cost to Australia may amount to billions of dollars," he writes, which is pretty impressive considering Australians already enjoy a low rate of unemployment, a steady economy, a robust education system, and a GDP growing at a faster rate than America's.

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