It was a usual day at the annual agricultural show in Dirranbandi, Queensland, in 2001 – except for the Japanese professor scurrying around asking people to drawl into a microphone.
The academic was Professor Kazuo Misono, who has recently completed his PhD on regional English accents in America, Britain and Australia, focusing on how the vowels in those accents are interpreted by Japanese speakers of English.
Professor Misono visited the south-western Queensland cattle and cotton town of Dirranbandi in 2001 as part of his field research to see how the local brogue compared to other accents.
His supervisor Dr John Ingram, senior linguistics lecturer at The University of Queensland, said Professor Misono’s data gathering resulted in a fascinating snapshot of the English language as it is today.
“His research is important from a cultural perspective - spoken language change mirrors societal changes,” Dr Ingram said.
“It is not recorded whether people were surprised to be confronted by a professor brandishing a microphone who wished to record their vowels.
“However, they cooperated willingly enough and a good deal of potentially valuable data was collected that day.”
Professor Misono’s research was also already proving valuable to people teaching English as a second language to Japanese people.
Dr Ingram explained that English has some relatively complex features for Japanese learners, having approximately 20 distinct vowels in Australian English as opposed to the Japanese five-vowel system.
English also has complex word stress, intonation and syllable structure that can prove challenging to Japanese learners of English, he said.
Professor Misono’s work was this year published in the book “Vowel Space in English: regional variants and their perception by Japanese learners of English” Tokyo: Hokuseido Press, 2007.
His PhD thesis is the culmination of years of field research and a 28-year career teaching English to Japanese college students and serving on national advisory committees for the teaching of English in Japan.
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