Australia 50

Listen to Australia 50, a 49-year-old man from Medindie, near Adelaide, South Australia, Australia. Click or tap the triangle-shaped play button to hear the subject.

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BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION

AGE: 49

DATE OF BIRTH (DD/MM/YYYY): 20/07/1976

PLACE OF BIRTH: Adelaide, South Australia

GENDER: male

ETHNICITY: Anglo-Celtic Australian/Caucasian

OCCUPATION: lawyer

EDUCATION: tertiary education and bachelor’s degree

AREAS OF RESIDENCE OUTSIDE REPRESENTATIVE REGION FOR LONGER THAN SIX MONTHS:

The subject spent two years, in his early twenties, on a working holiday in the United Kingdom and Ireland, mostly in Somerset and London, but also Dublin. And in his late thirties, he spent three years in Perth, Western Australia.

OTHER INFLUENCES ON SPEECH:

On his father’s side, the speaker’s grandparents were affluent, well educated, musical, multilingual, and highly literate; his grandfather was a doctor. On this side of the speaker’s family, elocution, grammatical conventions, and vocabulary were highly valued, and closely monitored, during conversation.

On his mother’s side, the speaker’s grandparents were educated to high school without matriculating. Both grandparents worked as publicans and later hotel brokers; the speaker’s mother was brought up living in hotels in Adelaide and country South Australia. This side of the speaker’s family spoke in broad, colloquial, South Australian English, and their speech was heavy with slang and parochial expressions. His grandmother still had the slight lilt of a Scottish accent.

The text used in our recordings of scripted speech can be found by clicking here.

RECORDED BY: subject

DATE OF RECORDING (DD/MM/YYYY): 08/12/2025

PHONETIC TRANSCRIPTION OF SCRIPTED SPEECH: N/A

TRANSCRIBED BY: N/A

DATE OF TRANSCRIPTION (DD/MM/YYYY): N/A

ORTHOGRAPHIC TRANSCRIPTION OF UNSCRIPTED SPEECH:

I was born in Adelaide and brought up in Medindie. Both my parents were also born in Adelaide, as were their parents, and in fact both sides of my family trace their heritage in South Australia to 1839 to 1850, that is, the, their arrival in the province. And they came from places like Lanarkshire in Scotland, Bute in Scotland, Whitby in Yorkshire, um, in the countryside near Birmingham, Kent, Devon, Exeter. And, ah, several of them came as refugees, ah, from religious persecution, as nonconformists, um, Methodists, um, seeking the religious freedom of South Australia, and others as refugees, ah, economic refugees, being crofters who had been ejected from their lands up in Scotland.

TRANSCRIBED BY: subject

DATE OF TRANSCRIPTION (DD/MM/YYYY): 08/12/2025

PHONETIC TRANSCRIPTION OF UNSCRIPTED SPEECH: N/A

TRANSCRIBED BY: N/A

DATE OF TRANSCRIPTION (DD/MM/YYYY): N/A

SCHOLARLY COMMENTARY: N/A

COMMENTARY BY: N/A

DATE OF COMMENTARY (DD/MM/YYYY): N/A

The archive provides:

• Recordings of accent/dialect speakers from the region you select.

• Text of the speakers’ biographical details.

• Scholarly commentary and analysis in some cases.

• In most cases, an orthographic transcription of the speakers’ unscripted speech.  In a small number of cases, you will also find a narrow phonetic transcription of the sample (see Phonetic Transcriptions for a complete list).  The recordings average four minutes in length and feature both the reading of one of two standard passages, and some unscripted speech. The two passages are Comma Gets a Cure (currently our standard passage) and The Rainbow Passage (used in our earliest recordings).

For instructional materials or coaching in the accents and dialects represented here, please go to Other Dialect Services.