The “lazy” Australian accent was caused by drinking, not a mix of dialects, according to a University of Melbourne communications expert. “The Australian alphabet cocktail was spiked by alcohol,” Dean Frenkel wrote in a case for teaching rhetoric at The Age. “The average Australian speaks to just two-thirds capacity—with one third of our articulator muscles always sedentary, as if lying on the couch; and that’s just concerning articulation.” The accent has been widely believed to be the result of mixed dialects in the early days of the colony.
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