A Phonemic Perspective on Accent Variation: American, British, and Australian English in Reverse: 1999

Abstract

This study examines how American, British, and Australian English accents are phonemically realized in the voice-acted dialogue of Reverse: 1999, aiming to show how regional accent features are reproduced in digital performance and how they contribute to character identity and narrative authenticity. Employing a qualitative descriptive design grounded in established phonemic frameworks by Crystal (2008), Roach (2020), and Wells (1982), the analysis samples selected in-game voice lines and transcribes each character’s speech in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) for comparison with canonical phonological descriptions. Findings indicate clear regional distinctions: American accents are marked by rhoticity, vowel fronting, and monophthongization; British varieties display non-rhoticity and lengthened back vowels; and Australian speech shows fronted /ʉː/, raised /æ/, and centering diphthongs. These results demonstrate that performed speech in video games can encode phonemic variation faithfully, thereby extending theories of accent perception into applied media contexts and supplying ecologically valid evidence of phonemic authenticity. The study bridges experimental phonetics and media representation and shows that accent realism can be evaluated through systematic linguistic analysis. Noted limitations include a narrow dataset and the absence of instrumental measurement, which future research could address through larger samples, acoustic analysis, and perceptual validation to strengthen claims about how audiences recognize and respond to accentual cues in interactive media.