The Border Effect: Vowel Differences across the NSW - Victorian Border ∗

For many years linguists have operated under the assumption that Australian English (AusE) is regionally uniform in its pronunciation with variations occurring mainly in the lexicon (Bryant, 1989). Any accent variability was thought to be along a well-described socio-stylistic continuum from Broad to Cultivated, reflecting affiliation with either a local or a British standard. This variability was not considered regionally significant apart from the suspicion that there were rural/urban correspondences such as those suggested by Mitchell and Delbridge (1965). The “broadness continuum” was primarily associated with an individual’s pronunciation of six main vowel types, /e, i, a, o, a, u/, although the architects of this classificatory system acknowledge that other aspects of production such as degree of assimilation, elision and nasality were also important parameters in categorisation.