Two Macquarie University linguists, Felicity Cox and Sallyanne Palethorpe throw interesting light on most of these in the interactive website that illustrates their research into the Australian accent, or, I should say, accents. They have identified three major groups of Australian accents: Standard Australian English, Aboriginal English and Ethnocultural Australian English varieties. There are, they say, fewer Australians speaking broad or ocker Australian and fewer speaking the plummy cultivated Australian, their explanation for the latter decline being that "it was no longer socially advantageous in the later part of the 20th century". The plum was always a comical fraud!

Especially interesting material on the website illustrates how Standard Australian is changing with the generations, and I can see, or hear, these changes in my own children. Young people tend now to pronounce the l in milk as a vowel, as in miook, use d instead of the t in such words as water, and pronounce school not as in pool but as in pull (or wool). While the linguists don't differentiate between young men and young women, they do note the tendency for young people to use a rising intonation in statements as well as the rising tone's usual use in questions.

In terms of my fears of us developing the American twang, they say it is extremely unlikely that watching television or movies will change an accent. Maybe it's just my familiarity with the yankee twang, but it does appear to me that there's not such a gulf between our accents these days.

And have you noticed that young women (and not young men) speak so impossibly quickly now?

It's a fascinating website - http://clas.mq.edu.au/voices/

A nd we'll all be interested in your observations of change in our Australian accents.