Australian English: phonology

English was brought to Australia in 1788 and the people who provided the original linguistic input to what was to become a distinctive national variety of English came from all over England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland. People from the whole social spectrum were represented but the colony began with its own built-in social division based on whether a person was a freeman or a convict, and this social division was passed on to the children of these original settlers as well. In the early days, men far outnumbered women. We know very little about how this diversity of input dialects was distributed across that social spectrum nor how that social spectrum helped to structure the ways of speaking of the first generations of native born speakers of Australian English (AusE). We do know that migration from England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland has continued from the earliest days and that these migrants have been joined by others, initially from northern Europe, and since the 1950s from southern Europe and the Middle East and in more recent times from Asia. Although the varieties of AusE are many, only some have been described in any detail. The English spoken by some Aborigines, for instance, is only just being examined as are the ethnolects, the particular contributions to AusE by the many migrants who learned English as a second language.

There is only the beginning of a discussion about how all of these diverse dialects of English came together to form AusE, but in the earliest descriptions of the phonology of AusE in the 1940s, Alexander G. Mitchell recognized a spectrum of pronunciations which were spread over the whole of the Australian continent. He believed, as did many others following his lead, that there were no social dialects (i.e. dialects associated with social class) nor any regional dialects. He later recognized three points on the pronunciation spectrum which he labelled Broad, General and Cultivated Australian English and these three have remained to this day as descriptors of the range of variation in pronunciation. On the prestige scale, Cultivated is the highest and is estimated to be spoken by only about 10% of Australians. Broad, spoken by about a third of the people, has the most marked AusE characteristics and has the least prestige. General falls in between these two varieties, is spoken by a majority of the people, and may well be increasing in strength as speakers move away from the more stigmatized Broad variety.

In the early 1960s Mitchell and Delbridge (1965) surveyed a large sample of high school students from across Australia and provided a detailed account of the phonological system of AusE. Later acoustic analysis by Bernard (1970) provided the basis for the pronunciations given in the Macquarie Dictionary published in 1981, the first dictionary of AusE. Mitchell and Delbridge found little to differentiate Australians either among themselves or other English speakers in the pronunciation of the consonants, but found the greatest source of variety in the FLEECE, GOAT, GOOSE, FACE, PRICE and MOUTH vowels. They took the position that Australian English was a single dialect with three varieties because they found no firm regional or cultural boundaries (Mitchell and Delbridge 1965: 87). More recent studies have shown that, although it is certainly the case that regional and social variation exists, the differences in pronunciation are often quantitative rather than qualitative. The consonants, too, have now been more widely studied and have also been found to represent sociolinguistic and/or geolinguistic variables. The vocalization of /l/, for instance, is widespread in Adelaide, not so prevalent in Sydney, and hardly ever heard in Brisbane. We will begin with a description of the vowel system for AusE and then proceed to discuss just those consonants which either have some particular significance or which have been the topic of research.