Last week a story started making the rounds claiming that the Australian accent is the result of an “alcoholic slur” from heavy-drinking early settlers. Here’s the story from the Telegraph, which is where I first saw it. The story has already been debunked by David Crystal and others, but it’s still going strong.

The story was first published in the Age by Dean Frenkel, a lecturer in public speaking and communications at Victoria University. Frenkel says that the early settlers frequently got drunk together, and their drunken slur began to be passed down to the rising generations.

Frenkel also says that “the average Australian speaks to just two thirds capacity—with one third of our articulator muscles always sedentary as if lying on the couch”. As evidence, he lists these features of Australian English phonology: “Missing consonants can include missing ‘t’s (Impordant), ‘l’s (Austraya) and ‘s’s (yesh), while many of our vowels are lazily transformed into other vowels, especially ‘a’s to ‘e’s (stending) and ‘i’s (New South Wyles) and ‘i’s to ‘oi’s (noight).”

The first sentence makes it sound as if Frenkel has done extensive phonetic studies on Australians—after all, how else would you know what a person’s articulator muscles are doing?—but the claim is pretty far-fetched. One-third of the average Australian’s articulator muscles are always sedentary? Wouldn’t they be completely atrophied if they were always unused? That sounds less like an epidemic of laziness and more like a national health crisis. But the second sentence makes it clear that Frenkel doesn’t have the first clue when it comes to phonetics and phonology.

There’s no missing consonant in impordant—the [t] sound has simply been transformed into an alveolar flap, [r], which also happens in some parts of the US. This is a process of lenition, in which sounds become more vowel-like, but it doesn’t necessarily correspond to laziness or lax articulator muscles. Austraya does have a missing consonant—or rather, it has a liquid consonant, [l], that has been transformed into the semivowel [j]. This is also an example of lenition, but, again, lenition doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with the force of articulation. Yesh (I presume for yes) involves a slight change in the placement of the tip of the tongue—it moves slightly further back towards the palate—but nothing to do with the force of articulation.

The vowel changes have even less to do with laziness. As David Crystal notes in his debunking, the raising of [æ] to [ε] in standing actually requires more muscular energy to produce, not less. I assume that lowering the diphthong [eɪ] to [æɪ] in Wales would thus take a little bit less energy, but the raising and rounding of [aɪ] to [ɔɪ] would require a little more. In other words, there is no clear pattern of laziness or laxness. Frenkel simply assumes that there’s a standard for which Australians should be aiming and that anything that misses that standard is evidence of laziness, regardless of the actual effort expended.

Even if it were a matter of laziness, the claim that one-third of the articular muscles are always sedentary is absolutely preposterous. There’s no evidence that Frenkel has done any kind of research on the subject; this is just a number pulled from thin air based on his uninformed perceptions of Australian phonetics.

And, again, even if his claims about Australian vocal laxness were true, his claims about the origin of this supposed laxness are still pretty tough to swallow. The early settlers passed on a drunken slur to their children? For that to be even remotely possible, every adult in Australian would have had to be drunk literally all the time, including new mothers. If that were true, Australia would be facing a raging epidemic of fetal alcohol syndrome, not sedentary speech muscles.

As far as I know, there is absolutely zero evidence that Australian settlers were ever that drunk, that constant drunkenness can have an effect on children who aren’t drinking, or that the Australian accent has anything in common with inebriated speech.

When pressed, Frenkel attempts to weasel out of his claims, saying, “I am telling you, it is a theory.” But in his original article, he never claimed that it was a theory; he simply asserted it as fact. And strictly speaking, it isn’t even a theory—at best it’s a hypothesis, because he has clearly done no research to substantiate or verify it.

But all this ridiculousness is just a setup for his real argument, which is that Australians need more training in rhetoric. He says,

If we all received communication training, Australia would become a cleverer country. When rhetoric is presented effectively, it enables content to be communicated in a listener-friendly environment, with well-chosen words spoken at a listenable rate and with balanced volume, fluency, clarity and understandability.

Communication training could certainly be a good thing, but again, there’s a problem—this isn’t rhetoric. Rhetoric is the art of discourse and argumentation; what Frenkel is describing is more like diction or elocution. He’s deploying bad logic and terrible linguistics in service of a completely muddled argument, which is that Australians need to learn to communicate better.

In the end, what really burns me about this story isn’t that Frenkel is peddling a load of tripe but that journalists are so eager to gobble it up. Their ignorance of linguistics is disappointing, but their utter credulousness is completely dismaying. And if that weren’t bad enough, in an effort to present a balanced take on the story, journalists are still giving him credence even when literally every linguist who has commented on it has said that it’s complete garbage.

Huffington Post ran the story with the subhead “It’s a highly controversial theory among other academics”. (They also originally called Frenkel a linguist, but this has been corrected.) But calling Frenkel’s hypothesis “a highly controversial theory among other academics” is like saying that alchemy is a highly controversial theory among chemists or that the flat-earth model is a highly controversial theory among geologists. This isn’t a real controversy, at least not in any meaningful way; it’s one uninformed guy spouting off nonsense and a lot other people calling him on it.

In the end, I think it was Merriam-Webster’s Kory Stamper who had the best response: