Фонетическая система австралийского английского языка

Sound system of Australian English

Australian English (AuE) is a non rhotic variety of English spoken by most native born Australians. Phonologically, it is one of the most regionally homogeneous language varieties in the world. Australian English is notable for vowel length contrasts which are absent from most English dialects. The Australian English vowels , , and 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 the former three vowels.

The target for is closer to cardinal than in other dialects. The aforementioned phrase fish and chips as pronounced by an Australian ( in narrow transcription) can sound a lot like feesh and cheeps to speakers of New Zealand English and other dialects, whereas words such as bit and sit may sound like beat and seat, respectively. The sound is usually pronounced as a diphthong (or disyllabically , like ) only in open syllables. In closed syllables, it is distinguished from primarily by length It is found in the adjectives bad, mad, glad and sad, before the sound (for example, hag, rag, bag) and also in content words before and in the same syllable (for example, ham, tan, plant). In South Australia, plant is usually pronounced with the vowel sound , as in rather and father. In some speakers, especially those with the broad accent, and will be shifted toward and , respectively. There is æ tensing before a nasal consonant. The nasal sounds create changes in preceding vowels because air can flow into the nose during the vowel. Nasal consonants can also affect the articulation of a vowel. Thus, for many speakers, the vowel in words like jam, man, dam and hand is shifted towards This is also present in General American and Cockney English. Length has become the main difference between words like 'ban' and 'Ben', with 'ban' pronounced and 'Ben' pronounced
is pronounced as open front by many younger speakers. As with New Zealand English, the / vowel in words like park , calm and farm is central (in the past even front) This vowel is only distinguished from the vowel by length, thus: park versus puck The phoneme is pronounced at least as high as , and has a lowered F3 that might indicate that it is rounded The glyph is used — rather than or — as most revisions of the phonemic orthography for Australian English predate the 1993 modifications to the International Phonetic Alphabet. At the time, was suitable for any mid central vowel, rounded or unrounded. The schwa is a highly variable sound. For this reason, it is not shown on the vowel charts to the right. The word final schwa in comma and letter is often lowered to so that it strongly resembles the vowel : As the latter is a checked vowel (meaning that it cannot occur in a final stressed position) and the lowering of is not categorical (meaning that those words can be also pronounced and , whereas strut is never pronounced ), this sound is considered to belong to the phoneme. The word initial schwa (as in enduring ) is typically mid : In the word internal position (as in bottom ), is raised to : , as in American English roses Thus, the difference between the of paddock and the of panic lies in the backness of the vowels, rather than their height: In the rest of the article, those allophones of are all transcribed with the broad symbol : etc. is also broadly transcribed with : , which does not capture its closeness.

The vowel has an onset , except before laterals. The onset is often lowered to , so that beat is for some speakers. As in American English and modern RP, the final vowel in words like happy and city is pronounced as (happee, citee), not as (happy tensing). In some parts of Australia, a fully backed allophone of , transcribed , is common before As a result, the pairs full/fool and pull/pool differ phonetically only in vowel length for those speakers. It differs somewhat from the ad hoc Wikipedia transcription used in this article. In a few instances the OED example word differs from the others given in this table; these are appended at the end of the second column following a semicolon.

Between voiced sounds, the glottal fricative may be realised as voiced , so that e. g. behind may be pronounced as either or The sequence is realised as a voiceless palatal fricative , so that e. g. huge is pronounced The word foyer is usually pronounced , as in NZ and American English, rather than as in British English. The word data is commonly pronounced , with being the second most common, and being very rare. The trans prefix is pronounced , even in South Australia, where the trap–bath split is significantly more advanced than in other states. In English, upward inflexion (a rise in the pitch of the voice at the end of an utterance) typically signals a question. Some Australian English speakers commonly use a form of upward inflexion in their speech that is not associated with asking questions. Some speakers use upward inflexion as a way of including their conversational partner in the dialogue. This is also common in Californian English.

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 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 New Zealand English does not have the bad lad split, but like Victoria has merged with 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 vowel in Southeastern England retain the vowel in Australia. Historically, the Australian English speaking manuals endorsed the lengthening of 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 would be found, th fronting, and h dropping. Flapping, which Australian English shares with New Zealand English and North American English, is also found in Cockney, where it occurs as a common alternative to the glottal stop in the intervocalic position. The word butter as pronounced by an Australian or New Zealander can be homophonous with the Cockney pronunciation (which could also be instead).

AusTalk is a database of Australian speech from all regions of the country. Initially, 1000 adult voices were planned to be recorded in the period between June 2011 and June 2016. By the end of it, voices of 861 speakers with ages ranging from 18 to 83 were recorded into the database, each lasting approximately an hour. The database is expected to be expanded in future, to include children's voices and more variations. As well as providing a resource for cultural studies, the database is expected to help improve speech based technology, such as speech recognition systems and hearing aids. The AusTalk database was collected as part of the Big Australian Speech Corpus (Big ASC) project, a collaboration between Australian universities and the speech technology experts.