An acoustic phonetic study of broad, general, and cultivated Australian English vowels*

Abstract The focus of this paper is an acoustic analysis of citation‐form monophthongs and diphthongs produced by a large number of male and female talkers whose accents vary from broad to general to cultivated and who were recorded as part of the Australian National Database of Spoken Language (ANDOSL). Following an initial auditory categorisation of the talkers’ accents, the formants frequencies were calculated and the data were labelled for vowel target positions. Four main kinds of analysis were carried out: of monophthongs, of onglides in /i u/ vowels, of the trajectories in rising diphthongs, and of the trajectories of falling diphthongs. Consistently with earlier studies, the results show that the broad/general/cultivated accent differences are confined mostly to the rising diphthongs and to ongliding in /i/. The production of the falling diphthongs was found to be phonetically the most variable of all vowel categories. Some proposals are included for a modification to the transcription system of Australian English.