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According to Merriam-Webster, a phoneme is "any of the abstract units of the phonetic system of language that correspond to a set of similar speech sounds".  In linguistics, a phoneme is the smallest unit of speech sound that distinguishes the meaning of morphemes and words in the same language.

They are not physical sounds or directly observable, but instead they are mental representations of the phonological units of a language, the units used to represent words in our mental lexicon (Fromkin et al, 2017).

Phonemes are documented using unique symbols that can be found in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), which is then placed between two forward slash symbols like /p/.

There are 44 phonemes in standard British English. 24 of them are consonant phonemes, whereas the other 20 are vowel phonemes, which consist of monophthongs as well as diphthongs.

Additional information: Since there are only 26 letters in the English language, it is clear that some of the available phonemes do not have a predominant one-letter spelling or a standard alphabet.

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How can we utilize a phonemic chart and what is the best kind of chart? Well, this video answers exactly that. From the layout of the chart to the reasons behind the placement of the phonemes, watch this guide to master the phonemic chart.

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These are some of the chosen sentences, which will be used to analyse the phonemic variation between the two countries' Englishes:

1. Well, here's a story for you: Sarah Perry was a veterinary nurse who had been working daily at an old zoo in a deserted district of the territory, so she was very happy to start a new job at a superb private practice in North Square near the Duke Street Tower.

2. Then she put on a plain yellow dress and a fleece jacket, picked up her kit and headed for work.

3. The letter implied that the animal could be suffering from a rare form of foot and mouth disease, which was surprising, because normally you would only expect to see it in a dog or a goat.

4. Before long, that itchy goose began to strut around the office like a lunatic, which made an unsanitary mess.

5. Sarah warned that this course of treatment might be expensive—either five or six times the cost of penicillin.

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Vowel:

Diphthong & Monophthong Variation

Consonant:

Elision of /t/ sound (glottalistion)

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Australia is the world's smallest continent and one of the world's largest countries, located in the Southern Hemisphere between the Pacific and Indian seas. Canberra, Australia's capital, is situated between the larger and more important economic and cultural cities of Sydney and Melbourne in the southeast. New South Wales is a state in southeastern Australia that encompasses both the coast and the interior tablelands.

Official Name: Commonwealth of Australia
Form of Government: Federal Parliamentary Constitutional Monarchy.
Capital: Canberra

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Australia, the smallest continent and one of the largest countries on Earth, lying between the Pacific and Indian oceans in the Southern Hemisphere. Australia's capital is Canberra, located in the southeast between the larger and more important economic and cultural centres of Sydney and Melbourne.

The Australian mainland extends from west to east for nearly 2,500 miles (4,000 km) and from Cape York Peninsula in the northeast to Wilsons Promontory in the southeast for nearly 2,000 miles (3,200 km). To the south, Australian jurisdiction extends a further 310 miles (500 km) to the southern extremity of the island of Tasmania, and in the north it extends to the southern shores of Papua New Guinea. Australia is separated from Indonesia to the northwest by the Timor and Arafura seas, from Papua New Guinea to the northeast by the Coral Sea and the Torres Strait, from the Coral Sea Islands Territory by the Great Barrier Reef, from New Zealand to the southeast by the Tasman Sea, and from Antarctica in the far south by the Indian Ocean.

Australia has been called "the Oldest Continent," "the Last of Lands," and "the Last Frontier." Those descriptions typify the world's fascination with Australia, but they are somewhat unsatisfactory. In simple physical terms, the age of much of the continent is certainly impressive-most of the rocks providing the foundation of Australian landforms were formed during Precambrian and Paleozoic time (some 4.6 billion to 252 million years ago)-but the ages of the cores of all the continents are approximately the same. On the other hand, whereas the landscape history of extensive areas in Europe and North America has been profoundly influenced by events and processes that occurred since late in the last Ice Age-roughly the past 25,000 years-in Australia scientists use a more extensive timescale that takes into account the great antiquity of the continent's landscape.

Australia is the last of lands only in the sense that it was the last continent, apart from Antarctica, to be explored by Europeans. At least 60,000 years before European explorers sailed into the South Pacific, the first Aboriginal explorers had arrived from Asia, and by 20,000 years ago they had spread throughout the mainland and its chief island outlier, Tasmania. When Captain Arthur Phillip of the British Royal Navy landed with the First Fleet at Botany Bay in 1788, there may have been between 250,000 and 500,000 Aboriginals, though some estimates are much higher. Largely nomadic hunters and gatherers, the Aboriginals had already transformed the primeval landscape, principally by the use of fire, and, contrary to common European perceptions, they had established robust, semipermanent settlements in well-favoured localities.

The American-style concept of a national "frontier" moving outward along a line of settlement is also inappropriate. There was, rather, a series of comparatively independent expansions from the margins of the various colonies, which were not joined in an independent federated union until 1901. Frontier metaphors were long employed to suggest the existence of yet another extension of Europe and especially of an outpost of Anglo-Celtic culture in the distant "antipodes."

The most striking characteristics of the vast country are its global isolation, its low relief, and the aridity of much of its surface. If, like the English novelist D.H. Lawrence, visitors from the Northern Hemisphere are at first overwhelmed by "the vast, uninhabited land and by the grey charred bush...so phantom-like, so ghostly, with its tall, pale trees and many dead trees, like corpses," they should remember that to Australians the bush-that sparsely populated Inland or Outback beyond the Great Dividing Range of mountains running along the Pacific coast and separating it from the cities in the east-is familiar and evokes nostalgia. It still retains some of the mystical quality it had for the first explorers searching for inland seas and great rivers, and it remains a symbol of Australia's strength and independence; the Outback poem by A.B. ("Banjo") Paterson, " Waltzing Matilda," is the unofficial national anthem of Australia known the world over.

Australia's isolation from other continents explains much of the singularity of its plant and animal life. Its unique flora and fauna include hundreds of kinds of eucalyptus trees and the only egg-laying mammals on Earth, the platypus and echidna. Other plants and animals associated with Australia are various acacias ( Acacia pycnantha [golden wattle] is the national flower) and dingoes, kangaroos, koalas, and kookaburras. The Great Barrier Reef, off the east coast of Queensland, is the greatest mass of coral in the world and one of the world's foremost tourist attractions. The country's low relief results from the long and extensive erosive action of the forces of wind, rain, and the heat of the sun during the great periods of geologic time when the continental mass was elevated well above sea level.

Isolation is also a pronounced characteristic of much of the social landscape beyond the large coastal cities. But an equally significant feature of modern Australian society is the representation of a broad spectrum of cultures drawn from many lands, a development stemming from immigration that is transforming the strong Anglo-Celtic orientation of Australian culture. Assimilation, of course, is seldom a quick and easy process, and minority rights, multiculturalism, and race-related issues have played a large part in contemporary Australian politics. In the late 1990s these issues sparked a conservative backlash.

Australia has a federal form of government, with a national government for the Commonwealth of Australia and individual state governments (those of New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland, South Australia, Western Australia, and Tasmania). Each state has a constitution, and its government exercises a limited degree of sovereignty. There are also two internal territories: Northern Territory, established as a self-governing territory in 1978, and the Australian Capital Territory (including the city of Canberra), which attained self-governing status in 1988. The federal authorities govern the external territories of Norfolk Island, the Cocos (Keeling) Islands, Christmas Island, Ashmore and Cartier islands, the Coral Sea Islands, and Heard Island and McDonald Islands and claim the Australian Antarctic Territory, an area larger than Australia itself. Papua New Guinea, formerly an Australian external territory, gained its independence in 1975.

Historically part of the British Empire and now a member of the Commonwealth, Australia is a relatively prosperous independent country. Australians are in many respects fortunate in that they do not share their continent-which is only a little smaller than the United States-with any other country. Extremely remote from their traditional allies and trading partners-it is some 12,000 miles (19,000 km) from Australia to Great Britain via the Indian Ocean and the Suez Canal and about 7,000 miles (11,000 km) across the Pacific Ocean to the west coast of the United States-Australians have become more interested in the proximity of huge potential markets in Asia and in the highly competitive industrialized economies of China, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. Australia, the continent and the country, may have been quite isolated at the beginning of the 20th century, but it entered the 21st century a culturally diverse land brimming with confidence, an attitude encouraged by the worldwide fascination with the land "Down Under" and demonstrated when Sydney hosted the 2000 Olympic Games.

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Australia | History, Cities, Population, Capital, Map, & Facts

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Australia is the smallest continent and one of the largest countries on Earth, lying between the Pacific and Indian oceans in the Southern Hemisphere. Its capital city is Canberra, and its most important economic and cultural centers are Sydney and Melbourne.

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There are variations in the types of English spoken throughout the world. For example, the quality of British English vowel sounds is different from those used in other regions, like Australia (Williamson, 2015). Therefore, even with a similar phonemic chart, lengths and variations are bound to exist due to regional differences as well as extensive variability in pronunciation.

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The Standard Australian Vowel Phoneme System

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According to McGill (n.d.), the sound of Australian English (AusE) is similar to the accents from the South-East of Britain, specifically Cockney and Received Pronunciation. However, it can be distinguished by its vowel phonology. They added that AusE vowels are divided into two categories:

1. Long (long monophthongs & diphthongs): The long vowels correspond to RP's tense vowels as well as its centralising diphthongs.

2. Short (monophthongs): The short vowels mostly correspond to those used in RP.

Additionally, AusE has a phonemic length distinction. A number of vowels differ by length, which is unlike most varieties of English. Thus, there are several vowel phonemes that are different and unique from others, especially BrE. The table above essentially summarizes the vowel phonemes that are available in AusE.

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The Standard British Vowel Phoneme System

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Based on our analysis, despite having almost similar phonemic sounds, British English phonemic vowels are not always represented with the same symbols presented in Australia  English phonemic vowel system (in which in AusE, they may come with extra features or vowels in the existing standard diphthongs and such).

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Examples of Vowel Variation between AusE and BrE

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Examples of Vowel Variation between AusE and BrE

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In order to analyse the phonemic variation between Australian and British English, we have done some research on the IPA spelling in the respective region and cross referenced the phonemes identified with the Australian and British speaker's speech. These are the variations of phonemes based on the script given:

Goose

In British English, the phonemic spelling is /gu:s/.

In Australian English, the phonemic spelling is /g u:s/.

Square

In British English, the phonemic spelling is /skweə/.

In Australian English, the phonemic spelling is /skwe:/.

Mouth

In British English, the phonemic spelling is /maʊθ/.

In Australian English, the phonemic spelling is /mæɔθ/.

Goat

In British English, the phonemic spelling is /gəʊt/.

In Australian English, the phonemic spelling is /gəʉt/.

Either

In British English, the phonemic spelling is /i:ðə/.

In Australian English, the phonemic spelling is /ʌɪðə/.

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The table above consists of the summarized phonemic representation of vowels in both standard AusE and BrE IPA for easy comparison.

There are differences present in both short and long vowels– also known as monophthongs and diphthongs– in both English variant. Although, the most prominent difference can be seen in the diphthong category.

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To complete this e-portfolio, we have approached an Australian speaker from New South Wales, Australia to analyse their English as well as visited dialectsarchive.com to analyse the English dialect spoken by a British native located in England. Thus, this column contains the demographic of the selected speakers from both countries.

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These are the existing consonants in the standard English language phonemic system.

We have identified that both Englishes of the selected regions essentially share the same phonemic symbols for consonants.

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Demographic of Australian Speaker (New South Wales)

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Demographic of Australian Speaker (New South Wales)

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Name: Zeba

Age: 24

Gender: Female

Current Location: New South Wales, Australia

Nationality: Australian
English: Australian English (AusE)
Accent: General Australian accent

Occupation: Kindergarten teacher

Additional Info:

Speaker first lived in Sydney, Australia, but has moved to New South Wales since then.

She mentioned that her accent is not as prominent as other Australians, which upon further research, we found that she has a general Australian accent.

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Demographic of British Speaker (England)

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Demographic of British Speaker (England)

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Name: NA

Age: 24 (at the time of recording)

Gender: Female

Current Location: South England

Nationality: British
English: British English (BrE)
Accent: Estuary-RP

Occupation: NA

Additional Info:

Speaker describes her speech pronunciation as "estuary-flavoured RP" (or received pronunciation, which is traditionally regarded as the standard British English) as she tends to assimilate various speech elements from different accents into her own.

She lived in Scotland for 4 years, which has led her to enunciate the [r] sound in certain words, also known as rhotic r; however, the dialects of modern England are non-rhotic.

(Sourced from https://www.dialectsarchive.com/england-72)

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England forms part of an island that takes up just under two-thirds of the island on the northwest coast of Europe. It is one of the four countries (the other three are: Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland) that makes up a sovereign state, which is known as the United Kingdom (U.K.).

Official Name: The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
Form of Government: Constitutional Monarchy With A Parliamentary Government
Capital: London

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England, predominant constituent unit of the United Kingdom, occupying more than half of the island of Great Britain.

Outside the British Isles, England is often erroneously considered synonymous with the island of Great Britain (England, Scotland, and Wales) and even with the entire United Kingdom. Despite the political, economic, and cultural legacy that has secured the perpetuation of its name, England no longer officially exists as a governmental or political unit-unlike Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland, which all have varying degrees of self-government in domestic affairs. It is rare for institutions to operate for England alone. Notable exceptions are the Church of England (Wales, Scotland, and Ireland, including Northern Ireland, have separate branches of the Anglican Communion) and sports associations for cricket, rugby, and football (soccer). In many ways England has seemingly been absorbed within the larger mass of Great Britain since the Act of Union of 1707.

Laced by great rivers and small streams, England is a fertile land, and the generosity of its soil has supported a thriving agricultural economy for millennia. In the early 19th century, England became the epicentre of a worldwide Industrial Revolution and soon the world's most industrialized country. Drawing resources from every settled continent, cities such as Manchester, Birmingham, and Liverpool converted raw materials into manufactured goods for a global market, while London, the country's capital, emerged as one of the world's preeminent cities and the hub of a political, economic, and cultural network that extended far beyond England's shores. Today the metropolitan area of London encompasses much of southeastern England and continues to serve as the financial centre of Europe and to be a centre of innovation-particularly in popular culture.

One of the fundamental English characteristics is diversity within a small compass. No place in England is more than 75 miles (120 km) from the sea, and even the farthest points in the country are no more than a day's journey by road or rail from London. Formed of the union of small Celtic and Anglo-Saxon kingdoms during the early medieval period, England has long comprised several distinct regions, each different in dialect, economy, religion, and disposition; indeed, even today many English people identify themselves by the regions or shires from which they come-e.g., Yorkshire, the West Country, the Midlands-and retain strong ties to those regions even if they live elsewhere. Yet commonalities are more important than these differences, many of which began to disappear in the era after World War II, especially with the transformation of England from a rural into a highly urbanized society. The country's island location has been of critical importance to the development of the English character, which fosters the seemingly contradictory qualities of candour and reserve along with conformity and eccentricity and which values social harmony and, as is true of many island countries, the good manners that ensure orderly relations in a densely populated landscape.

With the loss of Britain's vast overseas empire in the mid 20th century, England suffered an identity crisis, and much energy has been devoted to discussions of "Englishness"-that is, not only of just what it means to be English in a country that now has large immigrant populations from many former colonies and that is much more cosmopolitan than insular but also of what it means to be English as opposed to British. While English culture draws on the cultures of the world, it is quite unlike any other, if difficult to identify and define. Of it, English novelist George Orwell, the "revolutionary patriot" who chronicled politics and society in the 1930s and '40s, remarked in The Lion and the Unicorn (1941):

There is something distinctive and recognizable in English civilization....It is somehow bound up with solid breakfasts and gloomy Sundays, smoky towns and winding roads, green fields and red pillar-boxes. It has a flavour of its own. Moreover it is continuous, it stretches into the future and the past, there is something in it that persists, as in a living creature.

For many, Orwell captured as well as anyone the essence of what Shakespeare called "this blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England."

Land

England is bounded on the north by Scotland; on the west by the Irish Sea, Wales, and the Atlantic Ocean; on the south by the English Channel; and on the east by the North Sea.

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England | History, Map, Flag, Population, Cities, & Facts

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England, predominant constituent unit of the United Kingdom, occupying more than half of the island of Great Britain.

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Demographic of Australian Speaker

Demographic of British Speaker

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Australia in Brief

The Development of Australian English

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England in Brief

The Development of British English

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According to the Office for National Statistics (2021), The mid-year estimated population in England is 56,550,000 people- with white/caucasian being the majority, followed by Asian, Black, Mixed, and others.

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The Analysed Sentences

Speaker 1: Audio Recording (Australia)

Speaker 1: AusE IPA Transcription

Speaker 2: Audio Recording (England)

Speaker 2: BrE IPA Transcription

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What is a Phoneme?

Analysis 1: Vowel

Analysis 2: Consonant

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What is Prosody?

Analysis 1: Stress

Analysis 2: Rhythm

Analysis 3: Intonation

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What is a Lexicon?

Analysis 1: Vocabulary

Analysis 2: Spelling

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While English is the widely spoken language, there are also a number of other regional languages spoken or used throughout the country such as:

British Sign Language

Welsh

However, the Welsh language is are commonly used among the community who lives near the Welsh-English border in parts of England.

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The sentences we have chosen to analyse for this e-portfolio are taken from Comma Gets a Cure, written by Jill McCullough and Barbara Somerville. The five sentences are:

1. Well, here's a story for you: Sarah Perry was a veterinary nurse who had been working daily at an old zoo in a deserted district of the territory, so she was very happy to start a new job at a superb private practice in North Square near the Duke Street Tower.

2. Then she put on a plain yellow dress and a fleece jacket, picked up her kit and headed for work.

3. The letter implied that the animal could be suffering from a rare form of foot and mouth disease, which was surprising, because normally you would only expect to see it in a dog or a goat.

4. Before long, that itchy goose began to strut around the office like a lunatic, which made an unsanitary mess.

5. Sarah warned that this course of treatment might be expensive—either five or six times the cost of penicillin.

(Sourced from Comma Gets a Cure, https://www.dialectsarchive.com/comma-gets-a-cure)

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What is the difference between "a hearty welcome" and "a cordial reception"? In a brief, action-packed history of the English language, Kate Gardoqui explains why these semantically equal phrases evoke such different images. [Directed by Ben Tobitt, narrated by Kate Gardoqui].

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The consonants in English do not have that much difference or variation across the region, but one of the variations that we will be analysing today is the elision of the phoneme /t/ that appeared at the end of a word given, and why as well as how it happened.

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The audio included is recorded by an Australian speaker located in New South Wales, and it contains the five sentences we have chosen to analyse for this e-portfolio.

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This is the IPA transcription for the Australian speaker's speech:

1. wɛl, hɪəz ə stɔːri fɔː jɪuː seərʌ pɛri wɒz ə vɛtərɪnəri nɜːs huː hæd biːn wɜːkɪŋ deɪli æt æn əʊld zuː ɪn ə dɪzɜːtɪd dɪstrɪkt ɒv ðə ˈtɛrɪtəri, səʊ ʃiː wɒz vɛri hæpi tuː stɑːt ə njuː ʤɒb æt ə su:pə:b praɪvət præktɪs ɪn nɔːθ skwe: nɪə ðə djuːk striːt taʊə.

2. ðɛn ʃiː pʊʔ ɒn ə pleɪn jɛləʊ dres ænd ə fli:s ʤækət, pɪkt ʌp hɜː kɪt ænd hɛdəd fɔː wɜːk.

3. ðə lɛtər ɪmplaɪd ðæt ðə ænɪməl kʊd biː sʌfərɪŋ frɒm ə reə fɔːm ɒf fʊʔ ænd mæɔθ dəziːz, wɪʧ wɒz səpraɪzɪŋ, bɪkɒz nɔːməli juː wʊd əʊnli ækspɛkt tuː siː ɪt ɪn ə dɒg ɔːr ə gəʉt.

4. bɪfɔː lɒŋ, ðæt ɪʧi g u ːs bɪgæn tuː strʌt əraʊnd ðə ɒfɪs laɪk ə luːnətɪk, wɪʧ meɪd æn ʌnsænɪtəri mɛs.

5. seərʌ wɔːnd ðæt ðɪs kɔːs ɒf triːtmənt maɪt biː ɪkspɛnsɪv- ʌɪðə faɪv ɔː sɪks taɪmz ðə kɒst pɛnɪsɪlɪn.

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The audio included is recorded by a British speaker located in England, and it contains the five sentences we have chosen to analyse for this e-portfolio.

(Sourced from https://www.dialectsarchive.com/england-72)

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Example of Consonant Variation in the Speech

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Example of Consonant Variation in the Speech

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In the Australian's speech, the speaker omitted the /t/ sound or rather used a variant of /t/, which is a glottal stop /ʔ/,  in both /pʊt/ and /fʊt/.

Thus, the phonemic representation of Australian English speech is:

1. put - /pʊʔ/

2. foot - /fʊʔ/

So, how is the sound created?

According to British Council (n.d.), when the flow of air is stopped by the closing glottis, then released, the glottal stop sound– which is considered as a consonant– is produced.

A glottal stop is used in many varieties of English as an allophone of /t/ (Underhill, 2012), which may happen when the phoneme occurs at the end of the word position, like the words taken from the speech example: put and foot.

Additionally, T-glottalisation is rather common in Australia, however younger speakers are more likely to glottalise the phoneme compared to older speakers (Penney et al., 2019).

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The development of the English language can be broken down into several historical events. To begin with, the language took off in the 5th century when Britain was first invaded by three Germanic tribes: the Jutes, Saxons, and Angles. These tribes were merely looking for new lands to conquer, so they crossed the North Sea and reached a piece of land that we now recognize as the United Kingdom.

However, before the invasion, there was no such spoken or written language called English as the inhabitants mainly communicated with the Celtic language. The word England and English originated from the Old English word Engla-land, literally meaning “the land of the Angles” where they spoke Englisc. Meanwhile, during the invasion, the native Britons were driven north and west into lands we now refer to as Scotland, Ireland, and Wales.

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By clicking "Accept All Cookies", you agree to the storing of cookies on your device to enhance site navigation, analyze site usage, and assist in our marketing efforts. View our Cookie Policy

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A brief history of the English language - Oxford International English Schools

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English takes its place as one of the world's predominant forms of communication with its influences extending over as much as +2 billion people globally.

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When the Northern invaders inhabited the island, the community began to speak Old Eng but the few that still exist are not commonly used either. English today is a constantly changing language that has been influenced by a plethora of different cultures and languages, such as:

the Germanic languages (from which Dutch and German also developed)

French (business and political-related words were adopted into English)

Latin & Greek (due to technological advances, new words are constantly required

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According to Robinson (2019), the English language has always been a melting pot of Englishes. With diverse words, structures, and sounds, the language will always be unique and dissimilar from one town to the next.

Listen to the  regional accents and dialects:

Click on any pinned location on the map to hear recorded accents and dialects of speakers from England and other countries throughout the region.

Map source: https://www.bl.uk/british-accents-and-dialects/articles/accents-and-dialects-of-england

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British Accents and Dialects - Google My Maps

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The UK's regional accents and dialects reveal evidence of continuity and reflect our individual and shared linguistic identities. Click on a location on the map to hear speakers from 70 different locations recorded from the mid-20th century to the present day.

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Generally, they developed when groups of speakers of certain languages live in relative isolation, which means that they live without proper contact with others who speak the same way. During the 'isolation', they developed a way to communicate according to their own community, which comes with a distinctive pronunciation style, vocabulary, and even grammar.

Give this podcast a listen to understand more on why there are so many various accents and dialects in the UK as a whole.

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Episode 71 - Why Are There So Many Accents in the UK?

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Drive 1 hour in any direction in the UK and you’ll find yourself talking to someone with an entirely different accent, let’s find out why! Transcripts - www.unlockingbritishenglish.com Support the Podcast - www.patreon.com/unlockingbritishenglish Contact - Instagram: @unlockingbritishenglis…

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This is the IPA transcription for the British speaker's speech:

1. wɛl, hɪəz ə stɔːri fɔː juː: seərʌ pɛri wɒz ə vɛtərɪnəri nɜːs huː hæd biːn wɜːkɪŋ deɪli æt ən əʊld zuː ɪn ə dɪzɜːtɪd dɪstrɪkt ɒv ðə tɛrɪtəri, səʊ ʃiː wɒz vɛri hæpi tuː stɑːt ə njuː ʤɒb æt ə su:pəːb praɪvət præktɪs ɪn nɔːθ skweə nɪə ðə djuːk striːt taʊə.

2. ðɛn ʃiː pʊt ɒn ə pleɪn jɛləʊ drɛs ænd ə fliːs ʤækət, pɪkt ʌp hɜː kɪt ænd hɛdəd fɔː wɜːk.

3. ðə lɛtər ɪmplaɪd [ðæt] ði ænɪməl kʊd biː sʌfərɪŋ frɒm ə reə fɔːm ɒv fʊt ænd maʊθ dɪziːz, wɪʧ wɒz səpraɪzɪŋ, bɪkɒz nɔːməli juː wʊd əʊnli ækspɛkt tuː siː ɪt ɪn ə dɒg ɔːr ə gəʊt.

4. bɪfɔː lɒŋ, ðæt ɪʧi guːs bɪgæn tuː strʌt əraʊnd ði ɒfɪs laɪk ə luːnətɪk, wɪʧ meɪd ən ʌnsænɪtəri mɛs.

5. seərʌ wɔːnd ðæt ðɪs kɔːs ɒv triːtmənt maɪt biː ɪkspɛnsɪv-i:ðə faɪv ɔː sɪks taɪmz ðə kɒst ɒv pɛnɪsɪlɪn.

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According to Australian Bureau of Statistics (2021), at the end of March 2021, Australia's population was 25,704,340 people with the majority being from New South Wales.

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National, state and territory population, June 2025

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Statistics about the population and components of change (births, deaths, migration) for Australia and its states and territories

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Despite the fact that English is not Australia's official language, it is the country's most widely spoken and practised language. Unlike several European and early-settled countries, including the United States, the Australian accent has only three variations:

Broad (strong, nasal voice)

General (spoken by most Australians, not as nasal as the broad accent, but not as discreet as the cultivated accent)

Cultivated (the result of profound changes from relatives, the society, or experience)

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Accent change - different generations of speakers
Timeline of Accent Change
This timeline shows key events in Australian history which have influenced how our accent has changed since colonisation.

People of different ages have different accents and this is because change constantly occurs in the language. The accent of a community changes alongside social and political change but also because the sounds of speech make up a system that is self-regulating and constantly in flux. We can say that change can be external (social/political) or internal (linguistic/phonetic). Changes usually enter a dialect through the speech of teenagers or pre-teens who desire to express their identity independent of the previous generation.
History - a new dialect of English
Australian English is a relatively new dialect of English and is over 200 years old.

Australian English can be described as a new dialect that developed as a result of contact between people who spoke different, mutually intelligible, varieties of English.

The very early form of Australian English would have been first spoken by the children of the colonists born into the early colony in Sydney. This very first peer group would have spoken in similar ways to each other to help bind the peer group and express their group membership. This very first generation of children created a new dialect that was to become the language of the nation.

The children in the new colony would have been exposed to a wide range of different dialects from all over England but mainly the south east, particularly from London. They would have created the new dialect from elements present in the speech they heard around them in response to their need to express peer solidarity. Even when new settlers arrived, this new dialect of the children would have been strong enough to deflect the influence of new children.

There is evidence from early written sources that a new and distinct dialect was present in the colony by the 1830s.

Early Australian English

Although we can't know exactly what early Australian English sounded like, we can make some educated guesses based on audio recordings of the speech of people who were born in the 19th century, from written sources, and from historical records of the dialect mix present in the colony.

Broadness

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the "proto" SAusE differentiated into a continuum of broadness based primarily on the realisation of the diphthongs. Accent varied, ranging from the most local type (Broad Australian) through to a more British sounding type (Cultivated Australian). An intermediate category, General Australian, was the most common type.

Speakers were assigned to the Broadness categories mainly according to their pronunciation of six main vowels. These are the vowel sounds in the words "beat, boot, say, so, high, how".

Over the past 40 years, Australian English speakers have gradually moved towards the centre of this broadness continuum. The majority of younger speakers today use a General type of Australian English.

The move away from the Cultivated type is probably related to a shift in linguistic affiliation from a British external standard to an Australian internal standard of English. Throughout the second half of the 20th century, Australian English became increasingly accepted as the standard form of English used in this country. This acceptance was paralleled by Australian independence in a global marketplace.

Male broad

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Female broad

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Male general

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Female general

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Male cultivated

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Female cultivated

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Vowel shift

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This Vowel Shift animation depicts general changes that have occurred in Australian English monophthongs over the past 200 years and suggests some future change.

References:

Cox, F. (1999). Vowel Change in Australian English. Phonetica, 56, 1-27.

Cox, F., & Palethorpe, S. (2008). Reversal of short front vowel raising in Australian English. Proceedings of Interspeech 2008, 22-26 September 2008, Brisbane, 342-345.

Fritz, C. W. A. (2007). From English in Australia to Australian English 1788-1900. Frankfurt: Peter Lang.

Leitner, G. (2004). Australia's many voices: Australian English - The national language. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Moore, B. (2008). Speaking our language: The story of Australian English. South Melbourne: Oxford University Press.

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People of different ages have different accents and this is because change constantly occurs in the language. The accent of a community changes alongside social and political change but also because the sounds of speech make up a system that is self-regulating and constantly in flux

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Where Did The Australian Accent Come From?

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According to McGill (n.d.), shortly after the state of New South Wales was founded in 1788, Australian English grew to deviate from British English. In the book Two Years in New South Wales, published in 1827, Peter Cunningham claimed that native-born white Australians talked with a distinguished dialect and vocabulary, although with a heavy Cockney influence. In the 1850s, a significantly great surge of immigration resulting from the first Australian gold rushes had a huge impact on Australian English, with massive numbers of individuals using English as a second language.

The borrowing of words, spellings, phrases, and practice from North American English occurred during the gold rushes and was increased by a significant intake of US military men during World War II. Thus, various British and American vocabulary frequently overlapped in Australia, such as pants or trousers and lift or elevator, whereas other terms, including "wildfire," are disregarded in favour of the more Australian term "bushfire."

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Australian English ( AuE) is the form of the English language used in Australia.

Australian English began to diverge from British English soon after the foundation of the Colony of New South Wales in 1788. The settlement was intended mainly as a penal colony. The British convicts sent to Australia were mostly people from large English cities, such as Cockneys from London. In addition to these many of the original immigrants were free settlers, military personnel and administrators and their families. In 1827, Peter Cunningham, in his book Two Years in New South Wales, reported that native-born white Australians spoke with a distinctive accent and vocabulary, albeit with a strong Cockney influence. (The transportation of convicts to Australian colonies continued until 1868, but immigration of free settlers from Britain continued unabated.) A much larger wave of immigration, as a result of the first Australian gold rushes, in the 1850s, also had a significant influence on Australian English, including large numbers of people who spoke English as a second language.

The " Americanisation" of Australian English - signified by the borrowing of words, spellings, terms, and usages from North American English - began during the goldrushes, and was accelerated by a massive influx of United States military personnel during World War II. The large-scale importation of television programs and other mass media content from the US, from the 1950s onwards, including more recently US computer software, especially Microsoft's spellchecker, has also had a significant effect. As a result Australians use many British and American words interchangeably, such as pants/trousers or lift/elevator, while shunning other words such as "wildfire" as too American when a more Australian term "bushfire" is preferred.

Due to their shared history and geographical proximity, Australian English is most similar to New Zealand English. However, the difference between the two spoken versions is obvious to people from either country, if not to a casual observer from a third country. The vocabulary used also exhibits some striking differences.

Irish influences

There is some influence from Hiberno-English, but perhaps not as much as might be expected given that many Australians are of Irish descent. One such influence is the pronunciation of the name of the letter "H" as " haitch" /hæɪtʃ/, which can sometimes be heard amongst speakers of "Broad Australian English", rather than the unaspirated " aitch" /æɪtʃ/ more likely to be heard in South Australia and common in New Zealand, most of Britain and North America. This is thought to be the influence of Irish Catholic priests and nuns.

Other Irish influences include the non-standard plural of "you" as " youse" /jʉːz/, sometimes used informally in Australia, and the expression " good on you" or " good onya". Of these the former is common throughout North America and the latter is encountered in New Zealand English and British English. Another Irish influence is use of the word 'me' replacing 'my', such as in the phrase Where's me hat? This usage is generally restricted to informal situations. Another influence is the use of the term "after" as it is used in hiberno English.

Australian English is a non-rhotic dialect. The Australian accent is most similar to that of New Zealand and is also similar to accents from the South-East of Britain, particularly those of Cockney and Received Pronunciation. As with most dialects of English, it is distinguished primarily by its vowel phonology.

Australian English vowels are divided into two categories: long, which includes long monophthongs and diphthongs, and short, all of which are monophthongs. The short vowels mostly correspond to the lax vowels used in analyses of Received Pronunciation with the long vowels corresponding to its tense vowels as well as its centralising diphthongs. Unlike most varieties of English, it has a phonemic length distinction: a number of vowels differ only by the length.

Australian English consonants are similar to those of other non-rhotic varieties of English. In comparison to other varieties, it has a flapped variant of /t/ and /d/ in similar environments as in American English. Many speakers have also coalesced /tj/ and /dj/ into /tʃ/ and /dʒ/, with pronunciations such as /tʃʉːn/ being standard.

Vocabulary

Australian English incorporates many terms that Australians consider to be unique to their country. One of the best-known of these is outback which means a remote, sparsely-populated area. The similar bush can mean either native forests, or country areas in general. However, both terms are historically widely used in many English-speaking countries. Many such words, phrases or usages originated with the British convicts transported to Australia. Many words used frequently by country Australians are, or were, also used in all or part of England, with variations in meaning. For example: a creek in Australia, as in North America, is any stream or small river, whereas in England it is a small watercourse flowing into the sea; paddock is the Australian word for a field, while in England it is a small enclosure for livestock and; wooded areas in Australia are known as bush or scrub, as in North America, while in England, they are commonly used only in proper names (such as Shepherd's Bush and Wormwood Scrubs). Australian English and several British English dialects (eg. Cockney; Geordie) also both use the word mate to mean a close friend of the same gender and increasingly with platonic friend of the opposite sex (rather than the conventional meaning of "a spouse"), although this usage has also become common in some other varieties of English.

The origins of other terms are not as clear, or are disputed. Dinkum (or "fair dinkum") means "true", or when used in speech: "is that true?", "this is the truth!", and other meanings, depending on context and inflection. It is often claimed that dinkum dates back to the Australian goldrushes of the 1850s, and that it is derived from the Cantonese (or Hokkien) ding kam, meaning "top gold". However, scholars give greater credence to the notion that it originated with a now-extinct dialect word from the East Midlands in England, where dinkum (or dincum) meant "hard work" or "fair work", which was also the original meaning in Australian English. The derivation dinky-di means a 'true' or devoted Australian. The words dinkum or dinky-di and phrases like true blue are widely purported to be typical Australian sayings, but the majority of Australians, these days, don't say these at all, except when parodying the stereotypically "Australian" way of speaking.

Similarly, g'day, a stereotypical Australian greeting, is no longer synonymous with "good day" in other varieties of English (it can be used at night time) and is never used as an expression for "farewell", as "good day" is in other countries.

Some elements of Aboriginal languages have been incorporated into Australian English, mainly as names for places, flora and fauna (for example dingo, kangaroo). Beyond that, few terms have been adopted into the wider language, except for some localised terms, or slang. Some examples are cooee and Hard yakka. The former is a high-pitched call (pronounced /kʉː.iː/) which travels long distances and is used to attract attention. Cooee has also become a notional distance: if he's within cooee, we'll spot him. Hard yakka means hard work and is derived from yakka, from the Yagara/ Jagara language once spoken in the Brisbane region. Also from the Brisbane region comes the word bung meaning broken. A failed piece of equipment might be described as having bunged up or referred to as "on the bung" or "gone bung". Bung is also used to describe an individual who is pretending to be hurt; such individual is said to be "bunging it on".

Though often thought of as an Aboriginal word, didgeridoo (a well known wooden musical instrument) is probably an onomatopaoeic word of Western invention. It has also been suggested that it may have an Irish derivation.

Australian spelling is generally very similar to British spelling, with a few exceptions (for example, program is more common than programme). Publishers, schools, universities and governments typically use the Macquarie Dictionary as a standard spelling reference. Both -ise and -ize are accepted, as in British English, but -ise is the preferred form in Australian English by a ratio of about 3:1 according to the Macquarie's Australian Corpus of English.

There is a widely held belief in Australia that "American spellings" are a modern intrusion, but the debate over spelling is much older and has little to do with the influence of North American English. For example, a pamphlet entitled The So-Called "American Spelling.", published in Sydney some time before 1900, argued that "there is no valid etymological reason for the preservation of the u in such words as honour, labor, etc." The pamphlet noted, correctly, that "the tendency of people in Australasia is to excise the u, and one of the Sydney morning papers habitually does this, while the other generally follows the older form".

Many Australian newspapers once excised the "u", for words like "colour" but do not anymore, and the Australian Labor Party retains the "-or" ending it officially adopted in 1912. Because of a backlash to the perceived " Americanisation" of Australian English, there is now a trend to reinsert the "u" in words such as harbour. The town of Victor Harbour now has the Victor Harbour Railway Station and the municipality's official website speculates that excising the 'u' from the town's name was originally a 'spelling error'. This continues to cause confusion in how the town is named in official and unofficial documents

The official (although not commonly used) spelling of gaol/jail is gaol although most Australians would write jail naturally.

In academia, as long as the spelling is consistent, the usage of various English variants is generally accepted.

Varieties of Australian English

Most linguists consider there to be three main varieties of Australian English. These are Broad, General and Cultivated Australian English. These three main varieties are actually part of a continuum and are based on variations in accent. They often, but not always, reflect the social class and/or educational background of the speaker.

Broad Australian English is the archetypal and most recognisable variety. It is familiar to English speakers around the world because of its use in identifying Australian characters in non-Australian films and television programs. Examples include television personalities Steve Irwin and Dame Edna Everage.

General Australian English is the stereotypical variety of Australian English. It is the variety of English used by the majority of Australians and it dominates the accents found in contemporary Australian-made films and television programs. Examples include actors Russell Crowe and Nicole Kidman. Cultivated Australian English has many similarities to British Received Pronunciation, and is often mistaken for it. Cultivated Australian English is now spoken by less than 10% of the population. Examples include actors Judy Davis and Geoffrey Rush.

It is sometimes claimed that there are regional variations in pronunciation and accent. If present at all, however, they are very small compared to those of British and American English - so much so that linguists are divided on the question. Overall, pronunciation is determined less by region than by social, cultural and educational influences, as well as by a general difference between urban and rural voices that can be heard throughout Australia.

One example of a minor difference in pronunciation exists in the pronunciation of words such as: castle, dance, chance, advance, etc. In Queensland and Victoria, the Irish pronunciation of these words, choosing the æ-vowel, is preferred, whereas in New South Wales, the a:-vowel, found in English English, is preferred. The NSW pronunciation of these words is somewhat more predominant in such examples as in singing the national anthem, Advance Australia Fair, where [əd'va:ns] remains the preferred pronunciation of "advance" where it might otherwise be pronounced [əd'væ:ns] in Queensland and Victoria.

There is, however, some variation in Australian English vocabulary between different regions. Of particular interest in this respect are sporting terms and terms for food, clothing and beer glasses.

Use of words by Australians

Many Australians believe themselves to be direct in manner and/or admire frank and open communication. Such sentiments can lead to misunderstandings and offence being caused to people from other cultures.

For instance, spoken Australian English is generally more tolerant of offensive and/or abusive language than other variants. A famous exponent was the former Prime Minister Paul Keating, who referred in Parliament to various political opponents as a "mangy maggot", a "stupid foul-mouthed grub", and so on.

An important aspect of Australian English usage, inherited in large part from Britain and Ireland, is the use of deadpan humour, in which a person will make extravagant, outrageous and/or ridiculous statements in a neutral tone, and without explicitly indicating they are joking. Tourists seen to be gullible and/or lacking a sense of humour may be subjected to tales of kangaroos hopping across the Sydney Harbour Bridge, " drop bears" and similar tall tales.

Australian English makes frequent use of diminutives. They can be formed in a number of ways and can be used to indicate familiarity. Some examples include arvo (afternoon), servo ( service station), bottle-o ( bottle-shop), barbie (barbecue), cozzie (swimming costume), footy ( Australian rules football or rugby) and mozzie (mosquito). Occasionally, a -za diminutive is used, usually for personal names where the first of multiple syllables ends in an "r" for example Bazza (Barry) and Shazza (Sharon).

Many phrases once common to Australian English have become the subject of common stereotypes, over-use and Hollywood's caricaturised overexaggerations, even though they have largely disappeared from everyday use. Words being used less often include cobber, strewth, you beaut and crikey, and archetypal phrases like Flat out like a lizard drinking are rarely heard without a sense of irony.

The phrase Put a shrimp on the barbie is a misquotation of a phrase that became famous after being used by Paul Hogan in tourism advertisements that aired in America. Most Australians use the term prawn rather than shrimp, and do not commonly barbeque them. Many people trying to impersonate or mock an Australian will use this line, though Australians themselves would never have used this line.

Australia's unofficial national anthem Waltzing Matilda written by bush poet Banjo Patterson, contains many obsolete Australian words and phrases that appeal to a rural ideal and are understood by Australians even though they are not in common usage outside this song. One example is the title, which means travelling (particularly with a type of bed roll called a swag). Thus the refrain "You'll come a waltzing matilda with me" means you will come travelling with me. Part of the appeal of the song as distinctively Australian is its incomprehension to non-native Australian English speakers.

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Australian English ( AuE) is the form of the English language used in Australia. Australian English began to diverge from British English soon after the foundation of the Colony of New South Wales in 1788. The settlement was intended mainly as a penal colony.

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According to Wilson (2015), following the advent of European immigrants in 1788, the Australian accent began to take shape. It happened as a result of a process recognized as levelling down since the immigrants who arrived on 11 vessels came from diverse dialect regions all over England. They generally talk in a different manner and use multiple terminologies, and in order to connect with one another, they had to tone down their dialect distinctions.

They added that the English immigrants entering Australia approximately 50 years just after the country was established declared that Australians spoke the "purest English on earth." This time of discovery of new styles of communicating and new terms for subjects resulted in greater awareness of language and sound.

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Tracing the changes in Australian English from the First Fleet to present day is really about exploring the story of the nation, author Kel Richards says.

The English language arrived in Australia a little more than 200 years ago and since that time it has been levelled, sculpted and adapted to give Australians a specific dialect.

"When you trace the story of Australian English from 1788 to the present day, you find yourself actually tracing the story of the whole nation," Richards told 702 ABC Sydney's Dominic Knight.

Beyond the influences and movements that shaped our use and understanding of English, Richards said we first needed to consider our concept of language.

"They now say there is no such thing as English, the English language doesn't exist, there are only Englishes, only dialects.

"We have our dialects and as it happens, quite by coincidence, it is the best, most colourful, most inventive English dialect on the planet."

Richards has studied and interpreted the language's history and documented it in his new book, The Story of Australian English.

The beginnings of the Australian accent

According to Richards, the beginning of our Australian accent emerged following the arrival of European settlers in 1788.

"It emerged from a process called levelling down because you had all these people who came here on 11 ships from different dialect areas, regional dialect areas across England," he said.

"They all spoke differently and they used different words and what they had to do, in order to communicate with each other, was to level their dialect variations down."

Around 50 years after the colony was established, Richards said English people arriving in Australia started to claim that Australians were speaking the "purest English on earth".

This discovery period of other ways of speaking and other words for things brought an acute awareness of the language and sound.

"What our accent really is, is English with the dialect variations taken out.

"We now think of it as being our dialect, and it is, but that's what was happening in those early [days], it happened really fast."

Language 'ambushed' by elocution movements

About 100 years on from the First Fleet, Richards said the arrival of the elocution movement in the 1880s and 1890s "ambushed" our language and changed it for good.

"It started off on how to annunciate and speak clearly but what they did was pick one dialect, standard southern English, and they said 'that is correct'.

"Standard southern English came to be what is called RP, Received Pronunciation, Oxbridge, that kind of accent.

"That was right, everything else was wrong."

According to Richards, before this time general, middle Australian accents were predominant before cultivated and broad Australian accents arrived later, as a reaction to the elocution movement.

The story of our language, from 1788 to the present day, is actually the story of the nation.

"The evidence for this is that in the late 1950s, researchers went out and tape recorded some elderly people in their 80s and 90s who had been born in the far west of New South Wales and some of them in Tasmania," he explained.

"They all had general, middle Australian accents because when they were born in the 1880s and 1890s. There was no broad Australian, there was no cultivated Australian, it hadn't happened yet."

Population movements from the early military colony days to the stock industry, gold rushes and onwards undoubtedly had an impact on the variations in accent across the country.

However, Richards said perhaps not to the degree seen in other countries.

"If you look at what happened in America, the Pilgrim Fathers landed at Plymouth Rock and they stayed there and built up that colony.

"Another group of English people landed at Savannah, in Georgia, and they built up that colony and they remained in these isolated colonies for about 100 years.

"They developed their own vocabulary, their own accents, hence the range of accents in America."

Tracing the story of our language and the influences

As Richards explained, English dialect words, patois spoken by thieves called the Flash language, some military terms and Indigenous language have all informed the Australian vocabulary.

"They had to turn to the locals and say 'what do I call that?'

"It is such a rich and important part of our language."

In terms of Flash language as spoken by the convicts, a man by the name of James Hardy Vaux who authored an autobiography at the time, documented much of the slang found littered in our language today.

"A word like swag, swag was a bundle of stolen goods," he said.

"Then it becomes any bundle of goods and then the person who carries it becomes a swagman and suddenly you're in the middle of Waltzing Matilda, that's the way it works.

"The story of our language, from 1788 to the present day, is actually the story of the nation."

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Tracing the roots of Australian English from 1788 to present day, author Kel Richards maps the history and reasoning behind our language and distinctive sound.

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According to American Psychological Association (2014), prosody, which involves the rhythm, stress, and intonation of speech, conveys critical information in addition to the literal definition of words in a phrase.

Similarly, prosody is utilised to convey semantic information. For instance, when describing an upward motion, speakers' voices naturally rise in pitch.

Prosody entails accentuating the proper words, adjusting the intonation and tone of the voice, and incorporating necessary pauses.

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Prosody - the rhythm, stress, and intonation of speech - provides important information beyond a sentence's literal word meaning. For example, prosody provides clues about attitude or affective state: The sentence "Yeah, that was a great movie," can mean that the speaker liked the movie or the exact opposite, depending on the speaker's intonation.

Prosody is also used to provide semantic information. For example, speakers spontaneously raise the pitch of their voice when describing an upward motion.

Shintel, Anderson, and Fenn (2014, Journal of Experimental Psychology: General) (PDF, 155KB) examined whether prosodic information can serve as an additional cue that benefits memory.

During a learning phase, participants saw two images that represented an antonym pair (e.g., a big dog and a small dog) and were instructed to try to determine the property that distinguished the images (e.g., size). Then, an utterance that included a novel pseudoword (e.g., "This one is wug") was presented with an arrow indicating the referent image.

Thus, the visual information was sufficient to determine the meaning of the novel word: In this example, the images differ in size, so the arrow pointing to the small dog indicates that "wug" means "small." Two versions of each utterance were created, such that the speaker was asked to say the novel pseudoword while indicating each of the images. In this example, one utterance was created when the speaker intended to convey "big" and another when the speaker intended to convey "small."

The critical manipulation was whether the novel pseudoword was spoken with matching (e.g., pointing to "small," prosody indicative of small) or mismatching (e.g., pointing to "small," prosody indicative of large) prosody. Immediately after the learning phase or after a 24-hr delay, participants completed a multiple-choice test for the learned pseudoword definitions. Definitions of pseudowords spoken with matching prosody were remembered better than those spoken with mismatching prosody.

These results suggest that listeners extract semantic information from prosody even when the prosodic information is not necessary for comprehension, and this additional prosodic information can be used to create a stronger and more enduring memory representation when it is consistent with the to-be-remembered semantic information.

Although prosody can be thought of as adding musicality to speech, prosodic signals differ between speech and song. For example, in speech, pitch differences convey meaning and are relative to a speaker's vocal range, whereas songs rely on discrete and exact pitch values to create recognizable melodies.

Falk, Rathcke, and Dalla Bella (2014, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance) (PDF, 259KB) examined whether these different prosodic properties of speech versus song contribute to the "speech-to-song illusion," whereby a spoken phrase repeated several times is perceived as being sung.

Participants listened to repeated sentences with different pitch and rhythm properties. For each sentence, participants had to indicate when the sentence sounded like it was being sung instead of spoken. Consistent with the fact that pitch is the most salient cue for musical structure, stable pitch was the most reliable trigger of the speech-to-song illusion.

An interesting finding was that the speech-to-song transformation required more sentence repetitions in participants with musical training. Future research is required to determine whether this delay in the illusion for musicians occurs because they have better general auditory perception that allows them to better perceive differences in speech versus song-relevant properties or whether they require more evidence to classify an auditory signal as song because of their greater musical knowledge.

Other Interesting Reading

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particularly exciting experiments in psychology

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Prosody - the rhythm, stress, and intonation of speech - provides important information beyond a sentence's literal word meaning. For example, prosody provides clues about attitude or affective state: The sentence "Yeah, that was a great movie," can mean that the speaker liked the movie or the exact opposite, depending on the speaker's intonation.

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Do you want people to pay attention to what you have to say? Do you wish to improve your ability to express yourself and seize opportunities in life? Then, begin applying prosody variations as this video discusses the techniques and demonstrates how to utilise them to capture people's attention.

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Speak English FLUENTLY using prosody | Canguro English

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Attached is an extensive study that explores the prosodic features in-depth.

Summary:

Prosody is a name given to specific features of human speech that vary in terms of pitch, intonation, rhythm, and stress. These improve comprehension by conveying information such as lexical tone, accent, and emotion.

Based on their timing or rhythmic features, language can be roughly classified as stress-timed or syllable-timed.

Languages can also be classed as stress-accented and pitch-accented. Additionally, languages are classified as tonal or nontonal as well based on their tonal characteristics.

Numerous other languages do not completely comply with the rules of a category, implying that these classifications are fairly amorphous.

Different languages have their own intonation (pitch), rhythm (duration or melody), and stress (intensity or emphases).

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Prosodic Features For Language Identification

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1. Stress (Rhoticity)

2. Rhythm (Pace)

3. Intonation (Pitch)

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According to British Council (n.d.), prosodic stress corresponds to stress patterns that extend beyond the individual word. It may refer to a natural stress pattern unique to a specific language, but it may also relate to the placement of emphasis on particular words due to their relative significance.

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Essentially, rhotic speakers articulate the /r/ in words such as butter and better, whereas non-rhotic speakers do not. The term "non-rhotic" is in reference to the practise of "r"-dropping. To be precise, linguists frequently distinguish rhotic and non-rhotic dialects or accents.

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Rhoticity in Speech: ‘R’-Dropping and Intrusive ‘R’

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In phonetics, the term rhoticity refers broadly to the sounds of the “r” family. Linguists make distinctions between rhotic and non-rhotic accents.

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Examples of Rhoticity Between AusE and BrE

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Examples of Rhoticity Between AusE and BrE

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Rhotic accent (pronounced /r/) utter a rhotic consonant (r) in words. Non-rhotic speakers, such as those who speak British English (BrE) or Australian English, silence the /r/ in all of these terms. Based on the audio recordings given, both speakers share a non-rhotic accent. Below are some words extracted from the chosen sentences to be analysed.

First sentence:

here, nurse, working, deserted, start, superb, North Square, near, Tower.

Second sentence:

her, for, work.

Third sentence:

rare, form, surprising, normally.

Fourth sentence:

Before.

Fifth sentence:

warned, course, either, or.

For most speakers, a final /ə/ is heard as a lowered [a] (this should not be understood as a phoneme /a/, as it occurs only in closed syllables), or as [ə].

Essentially, the /r/ is not articulated in the middle of words nor is it used at the end of a word unless it is accompanied by a vowel or vowel sound. If a word ends with /r/ and is spoken before a word with a vowel beginning, the /r/ is heard.

Third sentence:

The letter implied that the animal could be suffering from a rare form of foot and mouth disease, which was surprising, because normally you would only expect to see it in a dog or a goat.

Thus, AusE and BrE are evidently non-rhotic; the /r/ sound does not take place at the end of a syllable or immediately preceding a consonant.

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According to Fromkin et al. (2017), a lexicon refers to the component of the grammar that contains a speaker's knowledge about morphemes and words. In other words, it is a mental dictionary of all the words a speaker knows.

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According to Gasser (2020), there are some languages that have numerous specialised terms for things and phrases. This highlights an important distinction between the vocabulary possessed by a language and the words understood by an individual speaker.

Factors Why Languages Differ Lexically:

Culture

Gender and Age

Slangs

Borrowed Words

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Some Reasons Languages Differ Lexically

So far we have endowed our Lexies with an amazing capacity, one that to date has only been found among human beings. Over the generations, they can now invent a very large store of labels for individuals and categories of things in the world (even categories of things not in the world). And, equally important, they can pass on this store of labels to their children.

Now let's imagine various tribes of Lexies in different parts of the world with no contact with each other. Each tribe will experience a different environment, containing its own potentially unique set of animals and plants and its own climate and geology. Each tribe will invent words for the things in its environment that matter to it, and we will naturally expect to find words for different things in each tribe. Modern languages also differ from each other in this way. Amharic has a word for hippopotamus because hippopotamuses are found in Ethiopia, but Inuktitut does not because hippopotamuses are not found (normally) in northern Canada.

We can also expect the cultures of the different tribes of Lexies to differ. This will result in several differences in their store of words. First, certain naturally occurring things will become more important. A tribe that makes pots out of clay will want a word for clay; another tribe may not bother. Second, as culture develops, there will be more and more cultural artifacts, that is, objects produced by the members of the culture. Naturally the tribe will want words for these as well, and if they are not producing them, they will not have such words. Finally, culture results in abstractions, concepts that do not represent (physical) things in the world at all: political units, social relationships, rituals, laws, and unseen forces. These will vary a great deal in their details from tribe to tribe, and we can expect these differences to be reflected in the words that each tribe comes up with.

Culture and Nouns

Modern languages also differ from each other in these ways. Amharic has the word agelgil meaning a leather-covered basket that Ethiopians used traditionally to carry prepared food when they traveled. Other languages don't have a word for this concept. English now has the word nerd to refer to a particular kind of person who is fascinated with technology and lacking in social skills. This is a relatively new concept, specific to certain cultures, and there is probably no word for it in most languages.

Differences Within and Among Languages

Exercise \(\PageIndex{1}\)

Languages such as English, Spanish, Mandarin Chinese, and Japanese have many specialized terms for computers and their use, whereas many other languages, such as Tzeltal and Inuktitut, do not. Does this represent some kind of fundamental limitation of these languages?

Finally we can also expect the store of words to vary among the individuals within each tribe. As culture progresses, experts emerge, people who specialize in agriculture or pottery or music or religion. Each of these groups will invent words that are not known to everyone in the tribe. Modern languages also have this property. A carpenter knows what a hasp is; I have no idea. I know what a morpheme is because I'm a linguist, but I don't expect most English speakers to know this.

This brings up an important distinction, that between the words that a language has and the words that an individual speaker of the language knows. Because some speakers of languages such as Mandarin Chinese, English, Spanish, and Japanese have traveled all over the world and studied the physical environments as well as the cultures they have found, these languages have words for concepts such as hippopotamus and polygamy, concepts that are not part of the everyday life of speakers of these languages. Thus it is almost certainly true that Mandarin Chinese, English, Spanish, and Japanese have more words than Amharic, Tzeltal, Lingala, and Inuktitut. But this fact is of little interest to linguists and other language scientists, who, if you remember, are concerned with what individual people know about their language (and sometimes other languages) and how they use this knowledge. There is no evidence that individual speakers of English or Japanese know any more words than individual speakers of Amharic or Tzeltal.

Where New Words Come From

Furthermore, if a language is lacking a word for a particular concept, it is a simple matter for the speakers of the language to add a new word when they become familiar with the concept. One way for this to happen is through semantic extension of an existing word; we saw this earlier with mouse in English. Another way is to create a new word out of combinations of old words or pieces of old words; we will see how this works in in Chapter 5 and Chapter 8. A third, very common, way is to simply borrow the word from another language. Thus English speakers borrowed the word algebra from Arabic; Japanese speakers borrowed their word for 'bread', pan, from Portuguese; Amharic speakers borrowed their word for 'automobile', mekina, from Italian; and Lingala speakers borrowed their word for 'chair', kiti, from Swahili.

Lexical Domains: Personal Pronouns

What are the differences between the personal pronouns you and you guys? (There are at least two differences.)

More interesting than isolated differences in the words that are available in different languages is how the concepts within a particular domain are conveyed in different languages. We'll consider two examples here, personal pronouns and nouns for kinship relations; we'll look at others later on when we discuss words for relations.

A complete set of personal pronouns in my dialect of English includes the following: I, me, you, she, her, he, him, it, we, us, you guys, they, them. Note that I'm writing you guys as two words, but in most important ways it behaves like one word. For our present purposes, we can ignore the following group: me, her, him, us, them; we're not really ready to discuss how they differ from the others. Among the ones that are left, let's consider how they differ from each other. We have already seen how they differ with respect to person: I and we are first person; you and you guys are second person; she, he, it, and theyare third person. We can view person as a dimension, a kind of scale along which concepts can vary. Each concept that varies along the dimension has a value for that dimension. The person dimension has only three possible values, first, second, and third, and each personal pronoun has one of these values.

Person is not just a conceptual dimension; it is a semantic dimension because the different values are reflected in different linguistic forms. That is, like words, semantic dimensions have both form and meaning. When we speak of "person", we may be talking about form, for example, the difference between the word forms I and you, about meaning, for example, the difference between Speaker and Hearer, or about the association between form and meaning.

But person alone is not enough to account for all of the differences among the pronouns. It does not distinguish I from we, for example. These two words differ on another semantic dimension, number. I is singular: it refers to an individual. We is plural: it refers to more than one individual. What values are possible on the number dimension? Of course languages have words for all of the different numbers, but within the personal pronouns, there seem to be only the following possibilities: singular, dual (two individuals), trial (three individuals), and plural (unspecified multiple individuals). Of these trial is very rare, and, among our set of nine languages, dual is used only in Inuktitut. Thus Inuktitut has three first person pronouns, uvanga 'I', uvaguk 'we (two people)', uvagut 'we (more than two people)'.

Given the two dimensions of person and number, we can divide up the English personal pronouns as shown in the table below. The third person pronouns fall into the singular group of three, she, he, and it, and the single plural pronoun they. The second person is more complicated. In relatively formal speech and writing, we use you for both singular and plural, but informally, at least in my dialect, we may also use you guys for the plural. (Note that other English dialects have other second person plural pronouns, you all/y'all, yunz, etc.) Thus we need to include both you and you guys in the plural column.

Clearly we need more dimensions to distinguish the words since two of the cells in our table contain more than one word. Among the third person singular pronouns, the remaining difference has to do with gender, whether the referent is being viewed as male, female, or neither. Instead of male and female, I will use the conventional linguistic terms masculine and feminine to emphasize that we are dealing with linguistic categories rather than biological categories in the world, and for the third value I will use neuter. Thus there are three possible values on the gender dimension for English, and three seems to be all that is needed for other languages, though some languages have a dimension similar to gender that has many more values.

That leaves the distinction between you and you guys in the plural. As we have already seen, this is related to formality, another semantic dimension and a very complicated one. I will have little to say about it here, except that it is related to the larger context (not just the utterance context) and to the relationship between the Speaker and Hearer. For example, language is likely to be relatively formal in the context of a public speech or when people talk to their employers. For now, let's assume that the formality dimension has only two values, informal and formal. The table below shows the breakdown of the English personal pronouns along the four dimensions of person, number, gender, and formality.

Gaps in Pronoun Systems

Notice that there seem to be gaps in the English system. There is a word for third person singular feminine, but no word for second person singular feminine, and formality is only relevant for second person plural. Because there is no masculine or feminine you in English, we can say that you is unspecified for the gender dimension. As we will see many times in the book, languages tend to be systematic - if they make a distinction somewhere, they tend to make that distinction elsewhere - but they are not always so. English personal pronouns are systematic in one important way: the distinction between first, second, and third person is maintained in both singular and plural. But they are not in other ways, as we have just seen.

You will probably not be surprised to learn that there is nothing special about the English system; other languages organize things somewhat differently, though it seems that person and number are relevant for all languages. Here is the set of Amharic personal pronouns.

Notice that Amharic fills some of the apparent gaps that English has; for example, there is both a masculine and a feminine second person singular pronoun, while English only makes the gender distinction in third person. But Amharic is unsystematic in some ways too; while gender is relevant for singular pronouns, it is not for plural pronouns, and, as in English, it doesn't enter into first person at all. Notice also that there is a new dimension, respect, that is relevant for Amharic pronouns, at least in second and third person singular. Respect is similar to formality, but it relates specifically to the attitude that the Speaker wants to convey toward the referent, that is, the Hearer in the case of second person and another person in the case of third person. In Amharic, there are two values for this dimension, plain and respectful. Finally, notice that while English has three values for gender, Amharic has only two, masculine and feminine. This means that one or the other of these must make do to refer to things that are neither male nor female. Many languages have only two genders, and each of these languages has its own way of determining which gender is appropriate for things that don't have "natural" gender.

We have seen only two examples of personal pronoun systems. Other languages have quite different systems, some making use of dimensions that are not relevant for English or Amharic, some ignoring dimensions that matter for English and Amharic. For example, in many languages, including Tzeltal and Inuktitut, gender plays no role at all in the personal pronoun systems: there is no distinction like that between he and she. It is not clear why pronoun systems vary the way they do. For example, it would be wrong to assume that Tzeltal pronouns lack gender because Tzeltal speakers are less conscious of gender in the world or that children learning Tzeltal become less sensitive to gender differences than children learning English or Amharic or Spanish. At least there is no evidence for these kinds of relationships. The relationship between language and thought has been most often studied in the context of grammar, and since we are looking at personal pronouns, we are getting pretty close to grammar, but we will save this topic for later.

Lexical Domains: Kinship Terms

What do the meanings of the words father and uncle have in common? What sort of dimension would you need to distinguish the meanings of these words?

Now let's look at the words we use to refer to kinship relations. We won't consider all of the words in a given language, just some of the basic ones. Let's start by taking two similar words and trying to figure out what dimension distinguishes their meanings, say brother and sister. This is easy since we've already been discussing this dimension; it's gender.

But gender won't help us with the distinction between daughter and mother since both are female. For these words we have to consider their relationship to the person who provides the reference point for the relationship, what cultural anthropologists (the experts on this topic) call ego. In both cases, there is a direct relationship (what anthropologists call lineal), but in one case the relationship goes in one direction (back into the past); in the other, it goes in the opposite direction (forward into the future). Let's call this dimension "vertical separation from ego". We can use positive and negative numbers to represent values on this dimension. In the case of mother, the separation is -1 (one generation back); in the case of daughter, it is +1 (one generation forward).

But these two dimensions won't suffice to distinguish all basic English kinship terms. What about mother and aunt? Both are female, and both are separated by -1 from ego. What distinguishes these two relations is the closeness of the relationship to ego. For mother, the person is in a lineal relation to ego. For aunt, we need to go back another generation, to ego's grandparents, to find a common ancestor. We will call this dimension "horizontal distance from ego" and represent it again with a number (but no sign). For mother, we will say the distance is 0; for aunt (and cousin and niece), it is 1. Here is a list of some English kinship terms with their values on the three dimensions. If a cell is left blank, the dimension is unspecified for that term.

Not All Languages have "Aunts" and "Uncles"

Now let's look at some of the terms that Lingala speakers use for kinship terms. Some of these are just like English, but others require different dimensions than are required for English. Lingala speakers use different words for siblings that are older or younger than ego and for aunts and uncles that are older or younger than their parents, but they don't normally distinguish siblings or aunts and uncles by gender. We'll refer to this as the "relative age" dimension. Lingala speakers also distinguish maternal and paternal aunts and uncles; we'll call this the "parent path" dimension. Finally, Lingala speakers use the same words for grandparents and grandchildren; that is, at least some of the time they are concerned only with vertical distance, not vertical direction (earlier or later). The table below shows values on the kinship dimensions for some Lingala kinship terms.

Differences in kinship terms are more likely to be related to culture than differences in personal pronouns. That is, when a single term (such as Lingala nkulutu 'older sibling') groups different relatives together, we might expect that in the culture where the language is spoken, those relatives are treated similarly by ego. (I don't know whether this is the case for Lingala speakers, however.) Words refer to categories, after all, and categories are a way in which people group the things in the world. Children growing up in a particular culture are learning the cultural concepts and the words simultaneously. Their experience with the culture should help them learn the words referring to cultural concepts, and their exposure to the words should help them learn the concepts. But little is actually known about how this sort of interaction works. In the next section we'll consider the learning of the meanings of apparently simpler nouns, those referring to physical objects. Even here we'll discover that there is considerable disagreement on how babies manage to master the words.

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2.6: Lexical Differences Among Languages

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So far we have endowed our Lexies with an amazing capacity, one that to date has only been found among human beings. Over the generations, they can now invent a very large store of labels for individuals and categories of things in the world (even categories of things not in the world).

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These are some of the chosen sentences, which will be used to analyse the lexical variation between the two countries' Englishes:

1. Well, here's a story for you: Sarah Perry was a veterinary nurse who had been working daily at an old zoo in a deserted district of the territory, so she was very happy to start a new job at a superb private practice in North Square near the Duke Street Tower.

2. Then she put on a plain yellow dress and a fleece jacket, picked up her kit and headed for work.

3. The letter implied that the animal could be suffering from a rare form of foot and mouth disease, which was surprising, because normally you would only expect to see it in a dog or a goat.

4. Before long, that itchy goose began to strut around the office like a lunatic, which made an unsanitary mess.

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1. Vocabulary

2. Spelling

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Insafi Saifin_Conclusion & Reflection (1)

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Nur Afiqah Tasnim binti Abu Bakar Bakri_Conclusion & Reflection 

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NUR AFIQAH TASNIM BINTI ABU BAKAR BAKRI_CONCLUSION AND REFLECTION

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According to British Council (n.d.), rhythm is among the features of prosody, along with intonation and stress. Speakers must be able to recognise the temporal organisation of phonemes, syllables, words, and sentences in a continuing speech stream in order to fully understand a spoken language.

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Generally speaking, English itself is a stess-timed language. In stress-timed languages, the delay between each stress in a sentence is nearly equal. Overall, the AusE speaker articulated the five sentences steadily with a number of intonations and noticeable pauses compared to the BrE speaker who talked promptly. For example, the highlighted texts reveal a distinction in pauses and pace between the two speakers.

Second sentence:

Then she put on a plain yellow dress and a fleece jacket, picked up her kit and headed for work.

Third sentence:

The letter implied that the animal could be suffering from a rare form of foot and mouth disease, which was surprising, because normally you would only expect to see it in a dog or a goat.

Fifth sentence:

Sarah warned that this course of treatment might be expensive—either five or six times the cost of penicillin.

It is clear from these examples and audio recordings that both of these speakers follow stress-timed language albeit the AusE speaker's pronunciation is more discernable with her breaks in speech. Hence, these factors might present the AusE speaker as someone relaxed and the BrE speaker as someone confident.

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According to British Council (n.d.), despite intonation being mainly a function of pitch alternation, it is crucial to acknowledge that tasks such as expressing emotions and moods or emphasising elements of grammatical structure typically require synchronicity in other prosodic variations.

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Example of Intonations Between AusE and BrE

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Example of Intonations Between AusE and BrE

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English Pronunciation Roadmap (2016) shared that typically, a rising intonation pattern would be applied for questions or statements. Falling intonation is a downward intonation that is frequently utilised in exclamation marks, demands, and orders, as well as at the conclusion of our sentences. There is, however, an additional circumflex inflexion: rise, fall, rise. So, we normally involve it in the middle of our dialogues and also at the conclusion of each sentence, each paragraph.

As the sentences analysed are used in a neutral context, it comes as no surprise that there are not a lot of intonations between the two speakers. However, the BrE speaker has shown to be more expressive compared to the other in instances such as:

First sentence:

Well, here's a story for you...working daily at an old zoo in a deserted district of the territory, so she was very happy...

Third sentence:

...foot and mouth disease, which was surprising, because normally you would only expect...

Fourth sentence:

Before long, that itchy goose...around the office like a lunatic, which...

Fifth sentence:

...either five or six times the cost of penicillin.

Nonetheless, the AusE speaker also had a few intonations as well such as:

First sentence:

Well, here's a story for you...so she was very happy...

Second sentence:

...picked up her kit and...

Third sentence:

...which was surprising, because normally you would only expect...

Fifth sentence:

Sarah warned that ...

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An article by Lingoda Team (2021) explains that Australian English, in general, borrows traits from both British and American English, hence is commonly referred to as a hybrid of the two. Nevertheless, it is critical to recognise that there is a multitude of distinctive qualities, including an exclusive vocabulary.

As with British English, Australian English contains an irregular past tense and past participles for verbs. Although similar to Americans, Australians prefer to pronounce numerals such as 1,100 as "eleven hundred" rather than "one thousand, one hundred."

Australian English, like British and American English, shares terms and phrases but also has its own unique vocabulary. Nonetheless, the Australian English lexicon differs significantly from British English, and Australians occasionally substitute American English words.

So, there are several terms that are popular in both British and American English but are also used little, if at all, in Australian English.

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[Cont.] Examples of Consonant Variation in the Speech

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[Cont.] Examples of Consonant Variation in the Speech

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The British speaker, on the other hand, did not use a variant or commit any glottalisation of any phoneme. In fact, their /t/ sound was very well enunciated: /pʊt/ and /fʊt/.

However, the process of t-glottalisation is very common throughout the UK, where the application is prevalent in a more informal and relaxed setting (Lingostar Language Service, 2020).

According to the Cambridge English Pronouncing Dictionary, t-glottalization is now most common in London, Leeds, Edinburgh, and Glasgow.

While it is a norm in the UK, it is entirely up to the speaker to decide if they would like to pronounce the /t/ sound or not. The British speaker we are analysing, for instance, is an example of not pronouncing the glottal sound.

Additionally, aside from glottalising the phoneme /t/  that appears at the end of a word, British speakers also glottalise the /t/ sound in the middle of most words. For example, some common words we often hear glottalised are bottle, water, and butter.

/bɒʔəl/, /wɔːʔə/, and /bʌʔǝ/

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British English Pronunciation: Glottal T vs Hard T | Learn English with Cambridge

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Examples of Vocabulary Differences Between AusE and BrE

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Examples of Vocabulary Differences Between AusE and BrE

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Happy

In BrE, this word simply expresses positive emotions. On the other hand, AusE would replace the word with "stoked" as with North Americans.

Kit

In AusE, this word refers to equipment or tools whereas in BrE, it has a few different meanings such as clothing (noun), providing a clothing (verb), or a large container (noun).

Lunatic

In BrE, this word means someone psychotic. While the meaning still retains in AusE, they would use the term "hooligan" instead.

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According to Style Manual (n.d.), a published guide by the government itself to write government content, Australian English generally shares the same spelling system with British English, however, there are exceptions to certain aspects of language formatting. They added that:

Most words have a single spelling, which can lead people to assume that there is always a ‘correct spelling’, when oftentimes, spellings are not uniform and inconsistent around the world. Australian, British and American English share words that have the same meaning, but they can be spelt differently.

If we were to check the English dictionary from respective regions, we would find that the dictionary entries may include different meanings for each word as well as alternative spellings.

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Examples of Spelling Between AusE and BrE

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Examples of Spelling Between AusE and BrE

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An example of a similar spelling variation that can be seen in the script is:

surprising

Based on our analysis and research, both of the Englishes from Australia and British share similar spelling for the word surprising, which would be different in other countries such as America. In America, their English has a slightly distinctive spelling system that would spell the word with a 'z' instead of an 's' (surprizing).

Other examples of words that share similar spellings between AusE and BrE when it would typically be spelled differently in AmE include words that end with:

-our in colour and humour

-ise in realise and apologise

-tre in theatre and centre

-l in enrol and fulfil

Other spelling variants that are used in other countries, like the US, include:

-or instead of -our

-ize instead of -ise

-ter instead of -tre

-ll instead of -l

Therefore, we can conclude that Australian and British English indeed share a similar spelling system.

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Australian English vs British English vs American English

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Australian English vs British English vs American English

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Australian English vs British English vs American English