University of Melbourne linguist Debbie Loakes has taken a closer look at south-west speakers and found they have a distinct accent from those in other parts of the state.

After testing people of all ages, Dr Loakes discovered Warrnambool residents, along with other people in the state’s south, were more likely to pronounce “el” sounds as “al”, so Melbourne becomes Malbourne, Ellen becomes Allen and television becomes talevision.

“Many people in the south, not everyone, have this sound change — they collapse the categories and also have trouble hearing a difference between ‘el’ words and ‘al’ words,” she said.

Dr Loakes analysed speech through recording people talking and by running a listening experiment where participants were asked to choose what they have heard from words such as hell or Hal and Mel or Mal.

Comparing her results in the south-west with speakers from Mildura and Albury-Wodonga, Dr Loakes discovered the “al” speech phenomena was exclusive to Victoria’s south.

“On the northern border there is a complete distinction between ‘el’ and ‘al’ and people have no trouble hearing a difference,” she said.

Dr Loakes said the sound change was more common in younger people “but older people do it too”.

“I think the thing I would like to impress upon people is that it is these tiny sound changes that impact the way we communicate, and thus have implications for human communication more broadly. 

“Already, for example, people speaking the same language actually ‘hear’ differences when they are faced with identical stimuli — based on the region they grew up.”

Dr Loakes said while her findings had been supported academically, the wider community’s reaction had been mixed.

“Some people feel validated, saying ‘oh, I do that’ — others disagree. Some people think perhaps I have no evidence for this, when in fact I have thousands and thousands of examples from speech and listening tasks,” she said.

While Warrnambool people may not recognise changes in their own speech, they are quick to point out other perceived differences.

“People in Warrnambool are convinced that people sound different at the South Australian border. I am intrigued by this given the relatively small difference,” she said.

“I want to look into it further, and I’d love to know what people on the South Australian border think.”

Dr Loakes’ next project is to work with indigenous people in the Warrnambool area.

“I want to understand how they speak English; whether it’s different, what their motivations are for sounding a certain way and so on,” she said. 

“I think it’s important to understand language by taking into account various perspectives and different community groups.”