Australian Indian English: Contact-Induced Adaptation in the Perception of Vowel Categories

Increased global mobility has intensified contact between regional English varieties, creating new opportunities for large-scale second dialect acquisition. Australia, with its rapidly growing population due to migration, offers a particularly dynamic context for exploring such contact. This study investigates how first-generation Indian migrants in the Australian city of Melbourne perceive Australian English vowels in the lexical items dress and trap, a contrast chosen because of sound changes that are well-documented for this location. Listeners completed a vowel categorization task involving target words in non-lateral and lateral contexts. To assess contact-induced adaptation, their responses were compared with those of Australian English speakers in Australia and those of Indian English speakers in India. The results reveal that perceptual adaptation among first-generation Indian migrants in Australia is context-dependent. In the non‑lateral coda context, migrant Indian English listeners (in Australia) showed intermediate responses, between those of Australian English listeners (in Australia) and Indian English listeners (in India), indicative of a relatively ‘linear’ adaptation towards Australian English. Responses to stimuli in the lateral coda context, however, revealed a more complex picture. Australian English listeners (in Australia) and Indian English listeners (in India) responded more closely to one another than migrant Indian English listeners (in Australia), with the latter instead exhibiting a substantial degree of perceptual confusion toward the endpoint of the continuum for hell–Hal and, to a lesser extent, for shell–shall and pell–pal. These findings suggest that in the perceptual adaptation to a second dialect, the acquisition of a wider pool of phonetic variants is mediated by the acquisition of structural knowledge.