Further study

Consonants

Table 1.1 Consonants that are present in Australian English to create words.

For more information go to: Broad transcription of Australian English

The first sound in each of the following words illustrates the consonants in this chart (note that for /ŋ/ it is the last sound in the word because English words cannot begin with this sound).

Linking /r/

1. Australian English is non-rhotic which means that it does not allow /r/ sounds before pauses or before other consonants. So the words “car” and “card” do not contain the /r/ sound. However, the /r/ sound can occur when a word that has a final “r” in the spelling comes before another word that starts with a vowel. For example, in “car alarm” the sound /r/ can occur in “car” because here it comes before another word beginning with a vowel. This is called a linking /r/. The words “far”, “far more” and “farm” do not contain an /r/  but “far out” may contain the linking /r/ sound because the next word starts with a vowel sound.

"far more"

"far"

"farm"

"far out"

Intrusive /r/

2. Australian English speakers may also use intrusive or epenthetic /r/. This is when an /r/ may be inserted before a vowel in words that do not have “r” in the spelling, For example, compare “draw” with no /r/ sound and “drawing”, “Tina Arena” which both contain intrusive /r/ sounds.

"drawing"

"draw"

"tina arena"

/j/

3. The sound /j/ occurs in Australian English at the beginning of words like "yellow" and "yes" and it also occurs in words like "new" and "tube". Palatalisation also typically occurs now in young speakers where /tj/, /dj/, /sj/ and /zj/ become single affricate or fricative sounds: For example in "tube", and  "tune", the /tj/ sound becomes the affricate "ch". An affricate also occurs in "dune".

"new"

"tube"

/tj/ in "tune" typically sounds the same as "choon"

/dj/ in "dune" typically sounds the same as "june"

/t/

4. There are a number of different /t/ sounds in Australian English. In unstressed syllables and at the ends of words, /t/ is quite weak and before pauses is often not released, but there is a lot of variation.  In the following examples you can hear a number of different versions of /t/ at the end of the word "light" from different male and female speakers.

"light" - female, unreleased

"light" - female, glottalised

"light" - female, aspirated

"light" - female, heavily aspirated

"light" - female, spirantised

"light" - male, unreleased

"light" - male, glottalised

"light" - male, aspirated

"light" - male, heavily aspirated

.

"light" - male, spirantised

/t/ between vowels is also quite variable. Listen to the different types of /t/ that occur in the word water (examples below). The second type of /t/ here is called a flap and this can occur when /t/ or /d/ are found between two vowels within words before an unstressed vowel (as in “water”, “cheddar”)

"water"

"water" - flap

"cheddar"

Flaps can also occur for /t/ before a syllabic /l/ and /m/

"battle"

Glottal stops occur in some contexts, for example

"buttons"

"light rain"

"not now"

/l/

/l/ has a range of variants. Clear /l/ (with the tip of the tongue behind the top teeth) occurs at the beginning of syllables and dark (velarised) /l/ (with the back of the tongue raised) occurs at the end of syllables, for example “leash” and “heel”.

"leash"

"heel"

For some speakers vocalisation of /l/ may occur in certain contexts. This is where the /l/ becomes more like a vowel.

"poodle"

Here are some more examples of vocalised /l/ in “milk", "ball" and "hall".

"milk"

"ball"

"hall"

To compare velarised (dark /l/) with vocalised /l/ listen to the following:

velarised

vocalised

Vocalisation reduces the contrast between certain words so “howl” sounds like “how” and both can sound like “hal”.  There is also a regionally distributed pattern for this variant with proportionately more speakers from South Australia using vocalised /l/. Compare /l/ vocalisation in “howl" vs. “how” vs. ”hal” which makes each of these words homophones.

"howl"

"how"

"hal"

Vowels

Vowels are very important in differentiating between dialects. The following are some characteristics of Australian English vowel sounds.

Monophthong vs diphthong

There are 18 Australian English stressed vowels, that is those vowels that can occur in isolated words. These can be divided into monophthongs and diphthongs. Monophthongs are sounds that can be made without dynamic movement of the tongue, lips, jaw whereas diphthongs are dynamic sounds and require movement of some articulators.

The following table shows the symbols that can be used to represent the Australian English vowels.

For more information go to http://clas.mq.edu.au/speech/phonetics/transcription/broad_transcription/systems.html

Centring diphthong

Australian English is a non-rhotic dialect. Dialects like this do not have /r/ sounds in words before consonants or pauses. So the words "fear" and "feared" which are spelled with "r" do not contain the sound /r/. Instead of /r/, these words have a vowel called a centring diphthong which is used in place of the vowel + /r/. There are two main centring diphthongs in Australian English. These are the vowels that occur in words like "air" and "ear". The way these vowels are produced is quite variable in Australia. Sometimes they are monophthongs and sometimes they are diphthongs. Sometimes they are made as two separate vowels, the disyllabic type that can occur at the end of a phrase. There appears to be some regional variation in the production of these diphthongs.

Monophthong: "hair"

Monophthong: "fear"

Diphthong: "hair"

Diphthong: "fear"

Disyllabic: "hair"

Disyllabic: "fear"

Most young Australian English speakers do not use the centring diphthong that used to occur in words like “pure” and “sure”. Instead they use the vowel in “saw” for words like “sure” and the disyllabic sequence of two vowels in words like “pure”.

Compare the old way of saying “sure”

With the new "sure"

and "pure"

Schwa

The unstressed vowel
Another vowel that occurs in Australian English which is not discussed above is the unstressed vowel schwa. This is the first sound in words like “ahead”. It is the most common vowel. The schwa vowel occurs three times in the word “photographer”. In Australian English, schwa that occurs at the end of a word particularly before a pause is often similar to the vowel in “cut”. Listen to the examples "ever" and "cheddar".

“ever”

“cheddar”

Trap-bath

Australian English is one of the dialects of English that has a long vowel in words like “bath”, “grass” and “laugh”. This is called the TRAP-BATH split which means that words like TRAP have a short vowel (the vowel in “dad”) and those like BATH have a long vowel (as in “hard”).

Listen to “bath oil”

“passport”

Dance

In Australian English, words like "chance, plant, branch, sample" (and words containing the suffix "-mand", e.g.,  "demand") usually have an /æ/ vowel as in "cat" but there are also many speakers who use the vowel in "cart" for these words, particularly in South Australia, which had a different settlement chronology and type than other parts of the country.

Listen to "France" short

and "France" long

Bad/lad

A long /æ/ sound is found in the adjectives “bad, mad, glad, sad”, before the sound /g/ (for example, “hag, rag, bag”) and also in content words before /m/ and /n/ in the same syllable (for example, “ham, tan, plant”). The long vowel is retained when suffixes are added such as in madder.

Listen to "bad"

and "pad"

Happy tensing

Happy tensing occurs where the final vowel in words like “happy” and “city” is the long vowel /i:/.

"happy"

"city"

Schwa merger

Unstressed /ɪ/ and schwa have merged in Australian English so that the last vowel in all the following words contains schwa.  “Sandra’s” vs “sandwiches”.  “rosa’s” and “roses” are identical.

Sandra's

sandwiches

Rosa's

roses

Before l

In words containing a long high vowel or diphthong, an unstressed schwa vowel will often be inserted before /l/.

For example “heel”

and “hail”

The vowel sound in “coat” is strongly affected by a following /l/ sound so that if this vowel occurs in words like “coal” it sounds quite different from the vowel in “coat” which does not have a following /l/ sound. The vowel before /l/ sounds more like the vowel in “pot”. Compare “dole” and “doll”. These vowels differ mainly by length.

"coat"

"coal"

"dole"

"doll"

The vowel sound in “who” and “food” is also significantly affected by a following /l/. For many speakers, this vowel changes from the vowel in “who” to one that is more like the vowel in “hood” when an /l/ follows (“pool” and “pull” are quite similar). For example listen to the two types of vowel in “school”. There is also a regional variation for this vowel.

"school" old

"school" new

Nasal

Vowels before "n" and other nasal sounds

The nasal sounds create changes in preceding vowels because air can flow into the nose during the vowel. Nasal consonants can also affect the articulation of a vowel. For some speakers words like "land" and "hand" will contain a vowel that sounds similar to a long /e/ vowel, that is the vowel in "head". Listen to a speaker whose vowel is changed markedly by the “n” sound and one whose vowel is not changed much by the "n" sound.

"bad" low

"ban" low

"ban" raised

Further reading

References

For more information about Australian English phonetics see:

Bernard J. (1970) Towards the acoustic specification of Australian English, Zeitschrift fur Phonetik 2/3: 113-128.

Burnham, D., Ambikairajah, E., Arciuli, J., Bennamoun, M., Best, C., Bird, S., Butcher, A. R., Cassidy, S., Chetty, G., Cox, F. M., Cutler, A., Dale, R., Epps, J. R., Fletcher, J.M., Goecke, R., Grayden D. B., Hajek, J. T., Ingram, J. C., Ishihara, S., Kemp, N., Kinoshita, Y., Kuratate, T., Lewis, T. W., Loakes, D. E., Onslow, M., Powers, D. , Rose, P., Togneri, R., Tran, D. & Wagner, M. (2009). A blueprint for a comprehensive Australian English auditory-visual speech corpus. In Haugh, M., Burridge, K., Mulder, J. and Peters P. (eds.) Selected proceedings of the 2008 HCSNet Workshop on Designing the Australian National Corpus. Somerville, (pp. 96-107), Cascadilla Proceedings Project, MA.

Burnham, D., Estival, D., Fazio, S., Cox, F., Dale, R., Viethen, J., Cassidy, S., Epps, J., Togneri, R., Kinoshita, Y., Göcke, R., Arciuli, J., Onslow, M., Lewis, T., Butcher, A. & Hajek, J. (2011). Building an audio-visual corpus of Australian English: large corpus collection with an economical portable and replicable Black Box, The proceedings of Interspeech 2011, (pp. 848-851), Florence, Italy.

Cassidy, S., Estival, D. & Cox, F. (2017). Case Study: the AusTalk Corpus, in Ide, N. & Pustejovsky, J. (eds.) Handbook of Linguistic Annotation, Springer, Berlin, 209-227. ISBN: 9789402408799.

Chen, H., Xu Rattanasone, N., Cox, F. & Demuth, K. (under review). Understanding the Acquisition of Phonemic Vowel Length Contrasts in Australian English-Learning 18- and 24-Month-Olds, Journal of Child Language.

Cox, F. (1998) The Bernard Data Revisited, Australian Journal of Linguistics, 18, 29-55.

Cox, F. M. (1999). Vowel Change in Australian English, Phonetica, 56, 1-27. ISSN 0031–8388

Cox, F. M. (2006a). The acoustic characteristics of /hVd/ vowels in the speech of some Australian teenagers. Australian Journal of Linguistics, 26, 147-179

Cox, F. M. (2006b). Australian English Pronunciation into the 21^st Century. Prospect: Australian Journal of TESOL, 21, 3-21

Cox, F. (2008) Vowel transcription systems: An Australian perspective. International Journal of Speech-Language Pathology, 10, 327-333.

Cox, F. M. (2019) Australian English: Phonetics and Phonology in Willoughby, L. & Manns, H. (eds) Australian English Reimagined: Structure, Features and Developments, Taylor & Francis/Routledge, Oxfordshire.

Cox, F. & Fletcher, J. (2017) 2^nd Edition, Australian English: Pronunciation and Transcription, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne. ISBN: 9781316639269.

Cox, F. M. & Palethorpe S. (1998). Regional variation in the vowels of female adolescents from Sydney. Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Spoken Language Processing. ICSLP, Sydney.

Cox, F. & Palethorpe, S. (2001) The changing face of Australian English vowels. In Blair, D.B. & Collins, P (eds). Varieties of English Around the World: English in Australia: John Benjamins Publishing, Amsterdam, 17-44.

Cox, F. & Palethorpe, S. (2004). The border effect: Vowel differences across the NSW / Victorian border. In Moskovsky, C. (ed.) Proceedings of the 2003 Conference of the Australian Linguistics Society, (pp. 1-14), Newcastle, Australia. http://www.als.asn.au/

Cox, F. & Palethorpe, S. (2007). Illustrations of the IPA: Australian English, Journal of the International Phonetic Association, 37, 341-350.

Cox, F. & Palethorpe, S. (2008). Reversal of short front vowel raising in Australian English, Proceedings of the 9^th Annual Conference the International Speech Communication Association (Interspeech 2008) incorporating the 12^th Australasian International Conference on Speech Science and Technology (SST 2008), (pp. 342-345), Brisbane, Australia.

Cox, F. and Palethorpe, S (2010). Broadness Variation in Australian English Speaking Females, in Tabain, M., Fletcher, J., Grayden, D., Hajek J. and Butcher, A. (eds.) The proceedings of the 13^th Australasian International Conference on Speech Science and Technology 2010 (SST 2010), (pp.175-178), Melbourne, Australia.

Cox, F. & Palethorpe, S. (2011). Timing differences in the VC rhyme of Standard Australian English and Lebanese Australian English, Proceedings of the 17^th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, Hong Kong, 17-21August 2011.

Cox, F. M. & Palethorpe, S. (2012). Standard Australian English: The Sociostylistic Broadness Continuum, in Hickey, R. (ed.) Standards of English: Codified Varieties around the World, Studies in Language, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 294-317. ISBN: 9780521763899.

Cox, F. & Palethorpe, S. (2014). Phonologisation of vowel duration and nasalised /æ/ in Australian English, in Hay, J. & Parnell, E. (eds.) Proceedings of the 15^th Australasian International Conference on Speech Science and Technology, 2-5 December, (pp. 33-36), Christchurch, New Zealand.

Cox, F. M. & Palethorpe, S. (2017). Open vowels in historical Australian English, in Hickey, R. (ed.) Listening to the Past, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 502-528. ISBN: 9781107051577.

Cox, F. & Palethorpe, S. (2018) Rosa's roses – unstressed vowel merger in Australian English, in Epps, J., Wolfe, J., Smith, J. & Jones, C. (Eds.) Proceedings of the 17^th Australasian International Conference on Speech Science and Technology, (pp. 89-92), Sydney, Australia Dec 4-7 2018

Cox, F., & Palethorpe, S. (2019). Vowel variation across four major Australian cities, in Calhoun, S., Escudero, P., Tabain, M. & Warren, P. (Eds.) Proceedings of the International Congress of Phonetic Sciences 2019, Canberra, Australia: Australasian Speech Science and Technology Association Inc.577-581.

Cox, F., Palethorpe, S. & Bentink, S. (2014). Phonetic archaeology and fifty years of change to Australian English /iː/, Australian Journal of Linguistics, 34, 50-75.

Cox, F., Palethorpe, S., Buckley, L. & Bentink, S. (2014). Hiatus resolution and linking /ɹ/ in Australian English, Journal of the International Phonetic Association, 44, 155-178.

Estival, D., Cassidy, S., Cox, F. & Burnham, D. (2014). AusTalk: An audio-visual corpus of Australian English, in Calzolari, N. et al. (eds.) Proceedings of the 9^thInternational Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (2014),(pp. 3105-3109), Reykjavik, Iceland.

Fletcher, J. & Harrington, J. (2001) High-rising terminals and fall-rise tunes in Australian English. Phonetica, 58, 215-229

Fletcher, J., Grabe, E. & Warren, P. (2004) Intonational variation in four dialects of English: The high rising tune. In Sun-Ah Jun (ed.), Prosodic typology. The Phonology of Intonation and Phrasing. Oxford: OUP.

Fletcher, J., Stirling, L. Wales, R. & Mushin, I. (2002) Rising intonation and dialogue acts in Australian English,  Language and Speech, 45, 229-254.

Harrington, J., Cox, F. and Evans, Z. (1997) An acoustic phonetic study of broad, general, and cultivated Australian English vowels. Australian Journal of Linguistics, 17, 155-184.

Horvath, B. (1985) Variation in Australian English: The Sociolects of Sydney. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

Horvath, B. (2004) Australian English: Phonology, in Schneider et al (eds.) A Handbook of Varieties of English, Vol. 1 Phonology, Mouton, Berlin. pp 625-644.

Ingram, J. (1989) Connected speech processes in Australian English. In Bradley, D., Sussex, R. D. & Scott, G. K. (eds.), Studies in Australian English, 21–49. Bundoora: Department of Linguistics, La Trobe University Victoria for the Australian Linguistic Society.

Lin, S., Palethorpe, S. & Cox, F. (2012). An ultrasound exploration of Australian English /CVl/ words, in Cox, F., Demuth, K., Lin, S., Miles, K., Palethrorpe, S., Shaw, J. and Yuen, I. (eds.) The proceedings of the 14^th Australasian International Conference on Speech Science and Technology 2012 (SST 2012), (pp. 105-108), Sydney, Australia.

Lonergan, J. & Cox, F. (2010). Is there any evidence of rhoticity in historical Australian English? Proceedings of the Australian Linguistic Society Conference 2008, (pp. 1-16), Sydney, Australia.

McGregor, J. & Palethorpe, S. (2008) High Rising Tunes in Australian English: The Communicative Function of L* And H* Pitch Accent Onsets. Australian Journal of Linguistics, 28, 171-193.

Mitchell, A. & Delbridge, A. (1965) The Speech of Australian Adolescents, Angus & Robertson, Sydney.

Penney, J., Cox, F., Palethorpe, S. & Miles, K. (2018). Glottalisation as a cue to coda stop voicing. Journal of Phonetics, 66, 161-184. doi:10.1016/j.wocn.2017.10.001

Penney, J. Cox, F. & Szakay, A (2018) Effects of glottalisation on reaction time in identifying coda voicing, in Epps, J., Wolfe, J., Smith, J. & Jones, C. (Eds.) Proceedings of the 17^th Australasian International Conference on Speech Science and Technology, (pp. 89-92), Sydney, Australia Dec 4-7 2018

Penney, J. Cox, F. & Szakay, A. (2018) Weighting of Coda Voicing Cues: Glottalisation and Vowel Duration, Proceedings of the Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association, INTERSPEECH 2018, (pp. 1422-1426), Hyderabad, India. https://www.isca-speech.org/ archive/ Interspeech_2018/pdfs/1677. pdf

Penney, J. Cox, F. & Szakay, A (2019). Glottalisation or the associated shorter modally voiced vowel: What do listeners use when perceiving coda voicelessness? in Calhoun, S., Escudero, P., Tabain, M. & Warren, P. (Eds.) Proceedings of the International Congress of Phonetic Sciences 2019, Canberra, Australia: Australasian Speech Science and Technology Association Inc.

Penney, J., Cox, F., & Szakay, A. (submitted). Effects of glottalisation, preceding vowel duration, and coda closure duration on the perception of coda stop voicing, Journal of Phonetics.

Penney, J., Cox, F., & Szakay, A. (published online 29.04.19). Glottalisation of coda stops in Australian English unstressed syllables. Journal of the International Phonetic Association. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0025100319000045

Ratko, L., Proctor, M. & Cox, F. (2019). Articulation of vowel length contrasts in Australian English, Proceedings of the Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association, INTERSPEECH, Graz, Austria.

Ratko, L., Proctor, M., Cox, F. (2019). Onset - Vowel Articulatory Coordination - voiceless stops and vowel length, in Calhoun, S., Escudero, P., Tabain, M. & Warren, P. (Eds.) Proceedings of the International Congress of Phonetic Sciences 2019, Canberra, Australia: Australasian Speech Science and Technology Association Inc.

Ratko, L., Proctor, M., Cox, F. & Veld, S. (2016). Preliminary Investigations into the Australian English Articulatory Vowel Space, in Carignan, C. & Tyler, M. D. (eds.) Proceedings of the Sixteenth Australasian International Conference on Speech Science and Technology, (pp.117-120), Sydney, Australia.

Szalay, T., Benders, T., Cox, F. & Proctor, M. (2016). Disambiguation of Australian English vowels, in Carignan, C. & Tyler, M. D. (eds.) Proceedings of the Sixteenth Australasian International Conference on Speech Science and Technology, (pp.73-76), Sydney, Australia.

Szalay, T., Benders, T., Cox, F. & Proctor, M. (2018) Production and perception of length contrast in lateral-final rimes, in Epps, J., Wolfe, J., Smith, J. & Jones, C. (Eds.) Proceedings of the 17^th Australasian International Conference on Speech Science and Technology, (pp. 129-132), Sydney, Australia Dec 4-7 2018

Szalay, T., Benders, T., Cox, F. & Proctor, M. (2019). Lingual configuration of Australian English /l/, in Calhoun, S., Escudero, P., Tabain, M. & Warren, P. (Eds.) Proceedings of the International Congress of Phonetic Sciences 2019, Canberra, Australia: Australasian Speech Science and Technology Association Inc.

Szalay, T., Benders, T., Cox, F. & Proctor, M. (under revision) Limits of compensation for coarticulation: /l/-final rimes in Australian English, Laboratory Phonology.

Tollfree, L. (2001) Variation and change in Australian English consonants. In Blair, D. & Collins, P. (eds.), Varieties of English around the World: English in Australia, 45–67. Amsterdam: Benjamins.

Wagner, M., Tran, D., Togneri, R., Rose, P., Powers, D., Onslow, M., Loakes, D., Lewis, T., Kuratate, T., Kinoshita, Y., Kemp, N., Ishihara, S., Ingram, J., Hajek, J., Grayden, D.B., Göcke, R., Fletcher, J., Estival, D., Epps, J., Dale, R., Cutler, A., Cox, F., Chetty, G., Cassidy, S., Butcher, A., Burnham, D., Bird, S., Best, C., Bennamoun, M., Arciuli, J., & Ambikairajah, E. (2010). The Big Australian Speech Corpus (The Big ASC). The proceedings of the 13^th Australasian International Conference on Speech Science and Technology 2010 (SST 2010), 166-170, Melbourne, Australia.

Walker, M., Szakay, A. & Cox, F. (2016). Regional priming in Australian English kit, dress and trap vowels, in Carignan, C. & Tyler, M. D. (eds.) Proceedings of the Sixteenth Australasian International Conference on Speech Science and Technology, (pp. 77-80), Sydney, Australia.

Walker, M., Szakay, A. & Cox, F. (2019). Can kiwis and koalas induce perceptual bias in Australian English-speaking listeners? Laboratory Phonology, 10, 1-29.

Yuen, I., Cox, F. & Demuth, K. (2012). Interaction of vowel length, utterance-position and accent in 3-year olds’ Australian English, in Cox, F., Demuth, K., Lin, S., Miles, K., Palethorpe, S., Shaw, J. and Yuen, I. (eds.) The proceedings of the 14^th Australasian International Conference on Speech Science and Technology 2012 (SST 2012), (pp. 17-20), Sydney, Australia.

Yuen, I., Cox, F. & Demuth, K. (2014). Three-year-olds’ production of Australian English phonemic vowel length as a function of prosodic context, Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 135, 1469-1479.

Yuen, I., Cox, F. & Demuth, K. (2015). Anticipatory planning of r-insertion in Australian English, in Wolters, M. et al (eds.) Proceedings of the 18^th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, Glasgow, Scotland.

Yuen, I., Cox, F., & Demuth, K.  (2017). Planning of hiatus-breaking inserted /ɹ/ in the speech of Australian English-speaking children. Journal of Speech, Language and Hearing Research, 60, 826-835.

Yuen, I., Cox, F. & Demuth, K. (2018). Prosodic effects on the planning of inserted 'r' in Australian English, Journal of Phonetics, 69, 29-42. doi.org/10.1016/j.wocn.2018.04.003

Further study

For information about studying Australian English at Macquarie University see Quick Links to:

Bachelor of Speech and Hearing Sciences in the Department of Linguistics

Coursework Masters Programs in the Department of Linguistics

Research Degree Programs in the Department of Linguistics