Rural versus urban

One popular stereotype about regional differences is that rural speech is more broad and urban speech is more cultivated; or that the entire rural hinterland speaks much the same – more slowly, more nasally, and more broadly. This is a part of the national reverence for the bush (rural Australia) and the idea that it is more typically Australian. It is clear that a higher proportion of rural Australians use a greater frequency of broad vowels than urban Australians. The first to quantify this were Mitchell and Delbridge (1965: 39), who found that 43 per cent of adolescents outside capital cities used broad vowels, while only 23 per cent of urban youth did so; and conversely, 19 per cent of urban adolescents but only four per cent of others used cultivated (high-status sociolect) vowels.

However, the rural hinterland of each capital city shows much the same regional (as opposed to social) characteristics as that city. Examples include the treatment of postvocalic laterals in Millicent and Mount Gambier in South Australia, the distribution of TRAP and PALM, and so on. The regional phonological boundaries do not correspond exactly to state boundaries; from a linguistic point of view, part of northern New South Wales is a part of Queensland, part of southwestern New South Wales around Broken Hill is similar in some ways to South Australia, and the Riverina region of southern New South Wales forms part of Victoria.