Bloody oath mate, I’m fair dinkum: speaking good Australian linked to trustworthiness

As a Londoner living in this strange land, I've spent a good decade navigating the Aussie accent and the peculiarities of Aussie 'English'. An English accent can often stop an Aussie in their tracks, and not fully grasping Aussie slang can set you apart pretty quickly. Fair dinkum (which now seems to me a pretty playful use of the Queen's English), will trip up any foreigner, as will a furphy, woop woop, or even a servo, a slab or a snag. Learning these phrases takes time, dedication and a steady diet of Home and Away and RBT (a personal favourite), but it could be all for naught. A new study from the University of Western Australia has found that if you don't speak with a good ‘Aussie’ accent, you’re more likely to be thought of as untrustworthy. Lead author Dr Cyril Grueter from UWA’s School of Human Sciences and his team wanted to know if Aussies discriminated against people with different accents. They conducted a psychological experiment where they recorded six speeches by three male speakers. The first part of the experiment changed up the accents — with Australian English, British English and English with a foreign (Swedish) accent. Listeners then rated each speech in terms of trustworthiness, and Australian listeners rated people with their own accent as having higher trustworthiness. “Interestingly, both British and Swedish English speakers received lower trustworthiness ratings; so the boundary isn’t drawn between native speakers and non-native speakers but between Australian English speakers and other English speakers," Dr Greuter said. The second part of the experiment peppered the speeches with the word 'mate'. As a foreigner, you could feel safe in the knowledge that you could nod and smile and drop a mate (inflection depending on the level of shit you're in) at the end of a sentence and 'she'd be right'. However, the study has once and for all disproved this theory. “We were specifically interested in the situation in Australia where you can hear all sorts of accents and it’s customary to use the term ‘mate’ to address people,” Dr Grueter said. “And, contrary to our prediction, using the word ‘mate’ did not improve trustworthiness ratings.” Dr Grueter said that more research was needed as the findings are based on only one study, however, they raise interesting questions for a multicultural society. “Accent is a pertinent social marker and can shape group preferences; non-native speakers are often perceived less positively than native speakers in domains such as integrity and solidarity.” “Nevertheless, our finding that accented speakers receive lower trustworthiness ratings from locals emphasise the need to take accent-based discrimination and prejudice seriously,” he said. For this Londoner, trust works both ways. How could I trust a nation that would coin the phrase 'Fair suck of the sav'?