Australian English over Time: Using Sociolinguistic Analysis to Inform Dialect Coaching

ABSTRACT

Depictions of Australian English in theater and film by non-Australian performers are often met with negative public reactions by Australian audiences. This partially stems from misconceptions about Australian vowel pronunciations (e.g., that mate and might are homophones); however, there is also a general lack of awareness about how Australian English has changed over time. Research in dialect coaching has long argued that dialect practitioners and learners must have sociolinguistic awareness of the phonetic reality of the dialect being represented. This paper is a resource to assist in the development of such awareness. Research methods from sociolinguistics and phonetics are applied to provide a detailed description of Australian English vowels as evidenced in a large, longitudinal corpus of spontaneous speech data. The corpus captures the speech of 95 Anglo-Celtic Australians in Australia’s largest city, Sydney, and includes recordings made at two points in time (1970s and 2010s) with speakers born between 1914 and 1999. The empirical description of vowel productions over time presented here provides a guide for dialect coaches and performers alike for application in their work with Australian English.

KEYWORDS:

• Dialect coaching
• dialect performance
• Australian English
• sociolinguistics
• phonetics
• vowels
• language change

Acknowledgments

We gratefully acknowledge support from the ARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language and the Sydney Speaks team; we also thank Rosey Billington and two anonymous VSR reviewers for insightful comments on an earlier version of this paper.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplementary Material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here.

Notes

1. Patterns of variation in unstressed vowels have received less attention than those of stressed vowels, due in part to the likelihood that such vowels are reduced.

2. The name Builders comes from this generation’s role in re-building the nation after events such as the World Wars and the Great Depression. In the United States, this generation is often called the Silent Generation.

3. Lobanov normalization converts Hertz values into z-scores, roughly anchored between 2 and −2 in both formant dimensions; these are the values presented in the figures given here.

4. We treat bath, palm, and start as a single vowel category in AusE, noting that palm typically refers to foreign loans (with the exception of a few native English words, like father (see Wells 1982, 143–144)). Throughout the paper, we refer to this class as bath/start, with start denoting tokens that occur before /r/ and may be rhotic in other varieties.

5. In AusE, lot includes words in the cloth lexical set, as in many UK varieties (Wells 1982, 136), and unlike US varieties, which typically equate cloth with thought. This includes words like dog, cloth, log, long, chocolate, off, golf, wash, squash, and slosh.

6. Force, north, and thought comprise a single vowel category in AusE. We, therefore, use thought/force to refer to this vowel category, with force denoting tokens that occur before /r/ and may be rhotic in other varieties.

7. Fleece has been described as both a monophthong (Cox 2012, 56) and a diphthong (Horvath 1985) in AusE. We include it as a diphthong here in accordance with our observations in the data.

8. We exclude from analysis (and the token numbers in Table S2) vowel tokens occurring in contexts that are both relatively infrequent in the data, and heavily influence formant trajectories, such as when followed by other vowels (e.g., choice in annoying), glides [w, j] (e.g., force in forward), and before /r/ (e.g., lot in foreign).

9. Note that this differs from US split-nasal systems that realize ban as diphthongal, e.g., [ɛæ] (see Labov, Ash, and Boberg 2006, 172–173).

10. A pre-lateral merger for dress and trap has been reported in parts of Victoria, such that celery and salary are homophonous for some speakers (Loakes et al. 2014).

11. Although absent in this dataset, can’t and shan’t are also always bath/start-like.

12. Tokens that are both post-coronal and pre-lateral (e.g., rule) pattern more like pool than too.

13. Though we note that over one half of the instances of pre-lateral face in the data occur in the word Australia, and its occurrence in this multi-syllabic word no doubt contributes to the limited movement observed.

14. Word-final position is particularly relevant to these vowels, as it accounts for 51% of the tokens of near and 70% of the tokens of square, compared with between 0% and 37% for all other vowel categories. Only 20 tokens of cure were present in the data.

15. Requests for access to further materials may also be considered. Please contact [email protected] if you wish to make such a request.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Benjamin Purser

Benjamin Purser,is Senior Research Officer for the ARC AusKidTalk project at Macquarie University. He was lead Research Assistant on Sydney Speaks within the ARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language at the Australian National University (ANU) from 2014 to 2019. He holds a PhB (Hons) from the ANU and a Diploma of Performing Arts (ED5International) and is a dialect and voice coach based in Sydney.

James Grama

James Grama, PhD, is a Research Fellow in the Department of Anglophone Studies at the University of Duisburg-Essen. From 2017-2020, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the ARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language at the Australian National University, where he worked on the Sydney Speaks project. He holds a PhD in linguistics from the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. His research interests include sociophonetics, language variation and change, dialectology, and variation in creoles and under-documented languages.

Catherine E. Travis

Catherine E. Travis, PhD, is Professor of Modern European Languages in the School of Literature, Languages and Linguistics at the ANU, and a Chief Investigator in the ARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language, through which she leads the Sydney Speaks project on which this paper is based. Her research addresses questions related to linguistic and social factors impacting on language variation and change, in particular in socially diverse communities.