Speech Science Resource Pages

The Vowels of Australian English and Other English Dialects

Robert Mannell

 

Important: If the two members of any of these pairs of phonetic tokens ([ & ʃ], [ & o̥], [ & oː], [ & n͡o], or [ & o͡o]) differ greatly from each other in shape, then click here for instructions on how to set up the phonetic font.

Recent Acoustic Studies of Australian English Vowels

Until recently, most Australian phoneticians used the symbols originally used by Mitchell (Mitchell, 1946; Mitchell & Delbridge, 1965) to make broad (or phonemic) transcriptions of Australian English vowels. Clark (1988) proposed a new system which more accurately represents the actual pronunciations of an "average" speaker of general Australian English. Clark's vowel symbols are an attempt to relate the actual pronunciation of each vowel by an average speaker of General Australian English (averaged across > 60 speakers) to the closest cardinal vowel. These pronunciations are derived from an acoustic study (Bernard, 1970; Bernard and Mannell, 1986) which will be dealt with in a separate course on Acoustic Phonetics. Cox (1996), Harrington, Cox and Evans (1997) examined further detailed acoustic data of Australian English vowels spoken by both adolescents and adults. The conclusions of those studies resulted in a further revision of Clark's proposals for the transcription of Australian English vowels. This new system is contrasted with that of Mitchell and Delbridge (used by the Macquarie Dictionary) in the table below.

Mitchell (1946) Harrington, Cox & Evans (1997) Example word
i iː heed
ɪ ɪ hid
ɛ e head
æ æ had
a ɐː hard
ʌ ɐ hut
ɒ ɔ hot
ɔ oː horde
ʊ ʊ hood
u ʉː shoot
ɜ ɜː heard
ə ə suppose
eɪ æɪ hate
aɪ ɑe hide
aʊ æɔ howl
oʊ əʉ hope
ɔɪ oɪ hoist
ɪə ɪə hear
ɛə eː hair
ʊə ʊə tour

Table 8: The vowel symbols utilised by Mitchell and Delbridge (1965) and Harrington, Cox and Evans (1997).

Very Important Note: Unless specifically told otherwise, when doing a broad transcription of Australian English for assessment in this course you must use the Harrington et al vowel set. If you use the Mitchell vowel set you will be marked wrong and your assignment may be returned to you for re-submission.

The Vowel Systems of Four English Dialects

The links at the bottom of this section are to diagrams of acoustic data plotted onto cardinal vowel charts. The data for Australian English is for General Australian English (see the pages on Impressionistic Studies of Australian English for background on the varieties of Australian English).

To work out a reasonably descriptive system of transcription for a dialect, simply use the closest cardinal vowel, or other IPA vowel symbol, to each vowel. For diphthongs, select the symbols nearest to the beginning and end of the arrow that describes the diphthong targets. The General Australian English data, when analysed in this way, should give you the symbols that we use in this course for the broad transcription of Australian English vowels.

Centring Diphthongs and Non-rhotic Dialects of English

In the above diagrams the centring diphthongs of Australian English, British RP English and New Zealand English have been omitted. These diphthongs only occur in non-rhotic dialects of English. These are dialects that don't pronounce the /r/ consonant at the end of a syllable when there is a following pause or consonant. These diphthongs occur as a result of the /r/ phoneme being reduced to a schwa offglide in these contexts. These diphthongs include /ɪə,eə,ʊə/ but their realisation in most dialects is evolving and there is evidence that some centring diphthongs may be disappearing (or in the case of Australian English, changing to monophthongs eg. /eə/ > /eː/). American English, being a rhotic dialect of English, does not have these vowels. Australian English centring diphthongs will be discussed in more detail in the material on Connected Speech and Broad Transcription.

Bibliography

Please note: The references listed below do not represent required reading for this module. This is simply a listing of the references cited in this module. On-campus students may, if they wish, use this list as a guide to further reading. External students should note that they will not be disadvantaged because of their inability to gain access to the following books and articles as they are optional additional reading only.

Bernard, J.R. (1970) "Toward the acoustic specification of Australian English", Zeitschrift fur Phonetik, Sprachwissenschaft und Kommunikationsforschung, Band 23, Heft 2/3

Bernard, J.R. and Mannell, R.H. (1986) "A study /h_d/ words in Australian English", Working Papers of the Speech, Hearing and Language Research Centre, Macquarie University

Clark, J.E. (1989) "Some proposals for a revised phonetic transcription of Australian English" in Collins, P. & Blair, D. (eds) Australian English: The Language of a New Society, Univ. Queensland Press.

Cox, F. M. (1996) An acoustic study of vowel variation in Australian English, Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Macquarie University.

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

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

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