1.2 Overview of Australian English Accent                                

Australian English is a very distinctive accent from American and British English. A general view in terms of linguistics and prosody is presented here by comparing with American and British.

Australia was first colonized by the English less than two centuries ago, Hence, it is without surprise that the Australia English accent is very much more similar to the accents of current England than those of Americans. If considering the enormous size of the territory over which it spoken, their accents are practically indistinguishable and tend to be a matter of urban versus rural.

Observations of Australian English vowels have given us detailed insight into variations that occur within the dialect and how Australian English (AusE) differs from British and American. The major characteristics of Australian are summarized as following.

• The front vowels in Australian, as in the words //, /e/, and /æ/ are all raised relative to the same vowels in British. This means that the vowel in the word // is rather closer to the /i:/ vowel than in British. The vowel /e/ is closer to the // vowel than in British and the vowel in the word /æ/ is closer to the /e/ vowel than in British. The vowels in the words /6:/ and /6/, which are back vowels in British, are more fronted in Australian and therefore closer to the /æ/ vowel. The high /U:/ and /U/ vowels are very similar to one another in British but these two are quite distinct in AusE. In section 3 we discuss these in more details.

• The centering diphthongs /ə/ and /e:/ occurring in Australianare often pronounced with negligible offglide such that the production is rather like prolonged monophthongal realization  // and /e/ vowels e.g. weary /wəri:/ /w:əi/.
• The glides in the /æc/ and /U/ vowels have different orientations in British relative to Australian. The rising diphthongs such as /æI/, /ae/, /ɔI/, /æc/, and /əU/ occur. /əU/, /ae/, /ɔI/ vowels have undergone a process of shift such that in Australian /æI/ is similar to British /ae/. In some instances, these differences may lead to misunderstanding such as the unfortunate woman who believed she was being sent home from the hospital ‘to die’ after being informed that she was ‘going home today’

• Australian English prefers the word-internal /ə/ and the word-final /i:/ to the unstressed //, e.g. that sounds for an Englishman as if it were thet.

• The Australian tend to merge all the unstressed vowels in /ə/ where British use / / and the ending – y, e.g., July /ʤəlai/,  Geelong, /ʤəlaŋ/. // is produced as // in most positions, in words like dance even /æ/.Like in the American South /æƱ/ occurs in words like pound (Bähr, 1974: 276.).

• As for the consonants, there are no glottal stops (in spite of all the similarities of British to Cockney). Some Australians, maybe due to Irish influx, produce rhotic words

Mitchel & Delbridge (1965) distinguish three main types of Australian pronunciation: Broad, General, and Cultivated.

• In the view of phonetic realization, the difference is minor when comparing British and Cultivated Australia English (CAusE) but considerable when we compare it with General English (GAusE) or Broad Australian English (BAusE).

• The vowel system of BAusE is very similar to Cockney, the accent of working class in London while the counterpart of CAusE is close to that of British.

• CAusE differs from GAusE and BAusE in terms of Diphthong Shifting, which is similar to that found in the southeast of England. BAusE is close to GAusE but with extra duration in the first element of the diphthongs. The mainly rural broad type has noticeably slow diphthongs.

• Characteristics of BAusE constitute majority of "the Australian accent" which is most readily identified by the following six sounds (Table 3).

Table 4: Six most distinctive sounds in BAusE

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