A Spectrographic Investigation of Some Australian Vowel Sounds

Australian English, in its spoken form, has been said to fall into three categories, Cultivated, General and Broad, the differences between these categories being located in differing realisations of the diphthongal phonemes. The pure vowels of all three varieties of Australian speech have been said to be closer and, in some cases, more advanced than their R.P. counterparts. The results of the investigation described here suggest that only the front vowels are closer in Australian speech than in R.P. but that all the Australian vowel sounds examined are more advanced, with the exception of [I]. The results suggest, furthermore, that all the pure vowel sounds in Broad Australian are more advanced than in Cultivated or General and also closer, with the exception of [a] and [ ]. The conclusion is, therefore, reached that the categorisation of the various Australian accents merely in terms of diphthongal differences is open to question.