The vowel system of AusE

As in most varieties of English, the most distinctive characteristic of the phonological system of AusE are the vowels. We will approach the description of the AusE vowels from three perspectives. First of all, an auditory description of the phonetic variants following Clark (1989: 209–212) will be presented. An acoustic description taken from the work of Harrington, Cox and Evans (1997) will demonstrate how the variants are distributed across the three major varieties of AusE, Broad, General and Cultivated. Finally, the sociolinguistic description of a selection of vowels will show how the Broad, General and Cultivated vowels are distributed across social dialects.