Australian English phonology

Australian English (AuE) accents are the non-rhotic pronunciations of English used by most native-born Australians. Phonologically, Australian English is a relatively regionally homogeneous variety of the English language. Australian English is notable for vowel length contrasts which are absent from some other English dialects.

The vowels of Australian English can be divided according to length. The long vowels, which include monophthongs and diphthongs, mostly correspond to the tense vowels used in analyses of Received Pronunciation (RP) as well as its centring diphthongs. The short vowels, consisting only of monophthongs, correspond to the RP lax vowels. There exist pairs of long and short vowels with overlapping vowel quality giving Australian English phonemic length distinction.

There are two families of phonemic transcriptions of Australian English: revised ones that attempt to more accurately represent the phonetic sounds of Australian English and the Mitchell-Delbridge system, which is minimally distinct from Jones' original transcription for RP. This page uses a revised transcription system from Harrington, Cox, and Fletcher (HCE), but at times it additionally provides the Mitchell-Delbridge equivalents as the latter system is commonly used for example in the Macquarie Dictionary and much of the literature.

The Australian English vowels /ɪ/ in KIT, /e/ in DRESS and /eː/ in SQUARE are noticeably closer (pronounced with a higher tongue position) than their contemporary Received Pronunciation equivalents. However, a recent short-front-vowel chain shift has resulted in younger generations having lower positions than this for these three vowels.

Australian English consonants are similar to those of other non-rhotic varieties of English. A table containing the consonant phonemes is given below.

Australian English pronunciation is most similar to that of New Zealand English; many people from other parts of the world often cannot distinguish them but there are differences. New Zealand English has centralised /ɪ/ and the other short front vowels are higher. New Zealand English more strongly maintains the diphthongal quality of the NEAR and SQUARE vowels and they can be merged as something around [iə]. New Zealand English, like Victoria, has merged /e/ with /æ/ in pre-lateral environments.

Both New Zealand English and Australian English are also similar to South African English, so they have even been grouped together under the common label "Southern Hemisphere Englishes". Like the other two varieties in that group, Australian English pronunciation bears some similarities to dialects from the South-East of Britain; Thus, it is non-rhotic and has the trap-bath split although, as indicated above, this split was not completed in Australia as it was in England, so many words that have the PALM vowel in Southeastern England retain the TRAP vowel in Australia.

Historically, the Australian English speaking manuals endorsed the lengthening of /ɔ/ before unvoiced fricatives however this has since been reversed. Australian English lacks some innovations in Cockney since the settling of Australia, such as the use of a glottal stop in many places where a /t/ would be found, th-fronting, and h-dropping