Broadness variation in Australian English speaking females

For nearly 50 years, Australian English has been described as a dialect exhibiting broadness variation reflective of sociodemographic speaker characteristics. However, observations suggesting the disintegration of the broadness continuum in the speech of young people today raise questions about its validity as a descriptive tool for current Australian English. In this paper we examine a set of vowels from 116 young Sydney females to explore whether vowel broadness does vary as a consequence of socioeconomic factors including school type, parents’ place of birth, region of upbringing and parents’ occupation. Results provide evidence against using traditional broadness categories to investigate sociolectal variation.

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