Australian English (AuE) is a non-rhotic variety of English spoken by most native-born Australians. Phonologically, it is one of the most regionally homogeneous language varieties in the world. Australian English is notable for vowel length contrasts which are absent from many English dialects. The Australian English vowels, and are noticeably closer (pronounced with a higher tongue position) than their contemporary Received Pronunciation equivalents. However, a recent short-front vowel chain shift has resulted in younger generations having lower positions than this for these three vowels.

Vowels

The vowels of Australian English can be divided according to length. The long vowels, which include monophthongs and diphthongs, mostly correspond to the tense vowels used in analyses of Received Pronunciation (RP) as well as its centring diphthongs. The short vowels, consisting only of monophthongs, correspond to the RP lax vowels. There exist pairs of long and short vowels with overlapping vowel quality giving Australian English phonemic length distinction. There are two families of phonemic transcriptions of Australian English: revised ones, which attempt to more accurately represent the phonetic sounds of Australian English; and the Mitchell-Delbridge system, which is minimally distinct from Jones' original transcription of RP. This page uses a revised transcription based on Durie and Hajek (1994) and Harrington, Cox and Evans (1997) but also shows the Mitchell-Delbridge equivalents as this system is commonly used for example in the Macquarie Dictionary and much literature, even recent.

Monophthongs

Diphthongs

Examples of vowels

It differs somewhat from the ad hoc Wikipedia transcription used in this article. In a few instances the OED example word differs from the others given in this table; these are appended at the end of the second column following a semicolon.

Consonants

Australian English consonants are similar to those of other non-rhotic varieties of English. A table containing the consonant phonemes is given below.

Other features

Relationship to other varieties

Australian English pronunciation is most similar to that of New Zealand English; many people from other parts of the world often cannot distinguish them but there are differences. New Zealand English has centralised and the other short front vowels are higher. New Zealand English more strongly maintains the diphthongal quality of the NEAR and SQUARE vowels and they can be merged as something around. New Zealand English does not have the bad-lad split, but like Victoria has merged with in pre-lateral environments. Both New Zealand English and Australian English are also similar to South African English, so they have even been grouped together under the common label "southern hemisphere Englishes". Like the other two varieties in that group, Australian English pronunciation bears some similarities to dialects from the South-East of Britain; Thus, it is non-rhotic and has the trap-bath split although, as indicated above, this split was not completed in Australia as it was in England, so many words that have the vowel in Southeastern England retain the vowel in Australia. Historically, the Australian English speaking manuals endorsed the lengthening of before unvoiced fricatives however this has since been reversed. Australian English lacks some innovations in Cockney since the settling of Australia, such as the use of a glottal stop in many places where a would be found, th-fronting, and h-dropping. Flapping, which Australian English shares with New Zealand English and North American English, is also found in Cockney, where it occurs as a common alternative to the glottal stop in the intervocalic position. The word butter as pronounced by an Australian or New Zealander can be homophonous with the Cockney pronunciation (which could also be instead).

AusTalk

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