The Australian accent is being examined by a new project at Australian universities.

Researchers at the University of Canberra, the Australian National University and nine other institutions will spend six months gathering voice recordings of 1000 Australians for the project.

UC researcher Yuko Kinoshita said the voice database would enable further development of forensic voice technology and voice recognition systems, as well as help define the Australian accent.

“We talk about the Australian accent but we actually don’t enough data to really define what it means, how Australians speak and their characteristics,” Dr Kinoshita said.

“We haven’t had any database of this scale before.”

See: The Canberra Times