Australian English pronunciation into the 21st century (original) (raw)
Related papers
James Lambert Review Cox Australian English Pronunciation 2013
Australian Journal of Linguistics, 2013
Preprint version of a review of: Felicity Cox, "Australian English: Pronunciation and Transcription" - the first textbook ever written to be completely devoted to Australian English. The full text is available from "Australian Journal of Linguistics", 33(1): 85–88. (DOI: 10.1080/07268602.2013.768154)
Reflections on the Australian English Dialect's Lexicon and Accent
2012
Australian English is one dialect of the language called “English”. It is quite well known around the world as having unique features but is sometimes mistakenly thought of as being more difficult than other dialects. As with other dialects, there are some aspects of Australian English that may be difficult to understand for a novice English learner, however standard Australian English is as easy to understand as the standard versions of other English dialects. This short essay will introduce some of the regional and broader forms of the Australian English dialect.
On the representation and evolution of Australian English and New Zealand English
On the representation and evolution of Australian English and New Zealand English, 2016
Australian English (AusE) and New Zealand English (NZE) are two originally “transported” Englishes in the Southern hemisphere. Although there is currently no doubt among the scientific community that they constitute two distinct dialects of English with their own lexical, morphosyntactic, phonological and phonetic features, their description and representation have long been frozen into a unique “Australasian” dialect, in spite of an enormous amount of endocentric linguistic descriptions emerging in the second half of the twentieth century. AusE and NZE being amongst the latest varieties to have emerged in the English-speaking world, they have only recently been extensively studied and considered as valid research objects by the scientific community. In this article we first consider some historical arguments that eventually led to a misleading descriptive hotchpotch of AusE and NZE. This situation scarcely left any room for the possibility of specific phonological and/or phonetic variation within each variety, let alone the description of AusE and NZE as two separate linguistic entities in Australasia. After reconsidering a few parallel historical facts, common critical denunciations and lay theories on the origins of the two Austral varieties, the article focuses on the representation of AusE and NZE in the literature on the phonology of English accents around the world. With a view to contribute to the definition of AusE and NZE as linguistic objects in motion and to promote a dynamic portrait of each variety, we then provide contemporary oral data from the PAC programme as well as comparative analyses in favour of two major arguments for distinctiveness between AusE and NZE: rhoticity in NZE as well as the short front vowel shift in both AusE and NZE.
Differentiation in Australian English
Varieties of English Around the World, 2014
This paper takes stock of findings based on the Monash Corpus of Australian English. In 1996-97 members of the (then) Monash University Department of Linguistics embarked on the collection of a corpus in Victoria to facilitate the study of variation in phonology, morphosyntax, lexicon and discourse patterns. The largest part of the corpus was based on data from Year 10 students in ten schools selected according to socioeconomic status of locality and type of school (state, Catholic, independent including Greek Orthodox and Jewish; coeducational and singlesex, boys and girls). The data comprises two conversations per student with a stranger (including some citation reading), and two self-taped conversations, one with (usually) three generations of their family and one with same-age friends. The corpus has been used for research by colleagues and graduate students from LaTrobe, Melbourne, and Monash Universities. It has enabled some hitherto unidentified syntactic features of Australian English to be recognized (concord, articles, relative clauses). It has drawn attention to intergenerational change in certain vowels, to developments in /t/ tapping and glottalization, most especially in informal settings, to onset glottalization, and to the emergence and disappearance of ethnolects and the identification of their features. It has also been employed for studies of discourse quotatives, including comparisons with American, British and Canadian English. As yet, the corpus remains underutilized. For example, phonological analysis has concentrated on the interview data, and much could still be done on situational variation, particularly in families of migrant background. There is also scope for a new round of recordings to make the project a longitudinal one.
Proceedings of the 16th Australasian International Conference on Speech Science and Technology, 2016
Using phonetic analysis, this investigation looks at the acoustic properties of Tasmanian English vowels, as produced by speakers of that variety of English from the Austalk corpus. It compares the formant values of monophthongal vowel targets to published formant values Melbourne and Sydney vowels. The aim of the study is to give a first outline of the vowel space of Tasmanian English, to determine whether there is any regional variation between Tasmanian and mainland vowel realisation, and to compare what differences there are in vowel realisations for older and younger speakers of Tasmanian English.
Sociophonetic Variation in Vowel Categorization of Australian English
Language and Speech, 2023
This study involves a perceptual categorization task for Australian English, designed to investigate regional and social variation in category boundaries between close-front vowel contrasts. Data are from four locations in southeast Australia. A total of 81 listeners from two listener groups took part: (a) so-called mainstream Australian English listeners from all four locations, and (b) L1 Aboriginal English listeners from one of the locations. Listeners heard front vowels /ɪ e ae/ arranged in 7-step continua presented at random. Varied phonetic contexts were analyzed, with a focus on coda /l/ because of a well-known prelateral merger of /e ae/ through mid-vowel lowering (e.g., celery-salary) reported to occur in some communities in this part of Australia. The results indicate that regional variation in Australian English is evident in perception. In particular, merging of /el/-/ael/ is shown to occur in the southernmost regions analyzed, but rarely in the northern regions of the geographical area under investigation. Aside from regional variation observed, age was also a factor in how participants responded to the task: older speakers had more merger than younger speakers in many locations, which is a new finding-previously, the merger was thought to be increasing in frequency over time, yet here we see this in only one location. Aboriginal English listeners also responded differently when compared with mainstream Australian English listeners. By analyzing the perception results across a variety of regional locations, with data from two different Australian social groups in the same location, this study adds a new dimension to our understanding of regional and social variations in Australian English.
127. Varieties of English: Australian/ New Zealand English
Handbücher zur Sprach- und Kommunikationswissenschaft / Handbooks of Linguistics and Communication Science 34.2, 2012
The chapter provides a comparative overview of the external histories, the development of the regional accents, vocabulary, and grammar in Australia and New Zealand. Both language contact with the indigenous languages as well as dialect contact amongst the original input varieties play a role in the evolution of the two Englishes. Social, ethnic, and regional varieties of the two southern-hemisphere Englishes are also of relevance to the history of New Englishes as their development represents an important step in the developmental process (Schneider 2007). The settlement period is treated, but more recent developments (i.e. the question of an ongoing Americanization) are also discussed. Evidence on the evolution of Australian and New Zealand English comes from demographic
Static vs dynamic perspectives on the realization of vowel nuclei in West Australian English
2015
This paper reports on an exploratory study of the application of different types of analysis method to the characterization of the acoustic properties of vowel realization in the performance of speakers of West Australian English (West AusE). Tense monophthongs and diphthongs produced in a word list by 18 speakers of West AusE were analysed using three different methods, two static and one dynamic. Results differ across the three methods with the dynamic analysis yielding substantially more detail and differentiation between and within vowel categories. Our findings enhance knowledge of a variety which has received scant attention in existing phonetic studies of AusE, and more generally contribute to the on-going discussion in the literature about which approach to acoustic analysis provides the best means of capturing the properties of vowel realization and variability.
Front Vowels as Speaker-Specific: Some Evidence from Australian English
2000
This investigation focuses on the degree of speaker-specificity in F2 and F3 of eleven Australian English monophthongs, determined using F-ratios from single-factor ANOVA. Non-contemporaneous samples of spontaneous speech produced by eight male speakers (four twin pairs) of Australian English were analysed, with the results indicating that the front vowels, and close-front vowels in particular, were most speaker-specific. The two most speaker-specific parameters, F2 and F3 of /I/, were then used to compare sameand different-speaker pairs, with the result s demonstrating between-speaker variation to be greater than within-speaker variation in the majority of cases.