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Language Variation – European Perspectives VIII: Selected papers from the Tenth International Conference on Language Variation in Europe (ICLaVE 10), Leeuwarden, June 2019
Edited by Hans Van de Velde, Nanna Haug Hilton and Remco Knooihuizen
[Studies in Language Variation 25] 2021
► pp. 291–314

Chapter 13
Ethnic variation in real time

Change in Australian English diphthongs

ORCID logo | University of Duisburg-Essen
ORCID logo | Australian National University
ORCID logo | Australian National University
Ethnic and ethnolectal variation in migrant communities have received much attention, but the manifestation and longevity of this variation is not yet well understood. Capitalising on Barbara Horvath’s foundational study of social variation in Australian English, and a comparable, recent corpus of sociolinguistic interviews (Sydney Speaks 2010s), we present a real-time test of ethnic variation in the speech of approximately 170 Australians over a 40-year period. We examine the speech of Anglo-, Italian- and Chinese-Australians, focusing on five diphthongs considered to be characteristic of Australian English. Analyses of over 20,000 tokens reveal no wholesale differences among ethnic groups, but they do reveal some differences in the progression and social conditioning of changes over time, which we argue are best understood in relation to the social nature of the changes undergone.
Keywords: ethnolects, ethnic variation, diphthongs, Australian English, language change, gender, socio-economic status
Article outline
  • 1.Ethnic and ethnolectal variation
  • 2.Variation in Australian English
  • 3.Changing ethnic diversity in Australia
  • 4.Data for the study of ethnic variation over time
    • 4.1Participants
    • 4.2Speech data
  • 5.Australian English in real time
    • 5.1Ethnic variation in Young Adult Australians in the 2010s
    • 5.2Anglo-Australians over time
    • 5.3Anglo and Italians over time
    • 5.4Ethnic and gender variation in Young Adult Australians in the 2010s
  • 6.Migrants and the progression of change
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at [email protected].

Published online: 16 June 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/silv.25.13gra
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