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Australian English: General Australian English
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Non-Australians can ... gain an impression of Australian English from well-known actors and other native speakers. The normal speaking voices of Cate Blanchett, Russell Crowe, Hugh Jackman, Nicole Kidman and Heath Ledger are examples of General Australian accents, unless they are acting in roles as non-Australians. Several Australian actors provided voices for Finding Nemo: Nigel the pelican, the three sharks, and the dentist have Broad Australian accents. Television star Steve "Crocodile Hunter" Irwin also has such an accent and as a result his voice is often parodied inside Australia as well as out. John O'Grady's novel They're a Weird Mob has many good examples of pseudo-phonetically written Australian speech during the 1950s, such as "owyergoinmateorright?" ("how're you going mate, alright?") and Thomas Keneally's novels, particularly The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, of putatively 19th century Australianisms such as "yair" for "yes" and "nothink" for "nothing."
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General Australian English is the stereotypical variety of Australian English. It is the variety that the majority of Australians use and predominates among modern Australian films and television programs. Examples are actors Nicole Kidman, Cate Blanchett and Russell Crowe (who, although born and partly-raised in New Zealand, does not speak New Zealand English).
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This topic covers briefly some of the results of acoustic studies of Australian English. These results are summarised in a number of diagrams which place the acoustic data onto cardinal vowel grids. This is not the normal way of displaying acoustic data but it is done here for pedagogic reasons. Similar data is ... presented for British RP English, General American English and New Zealand English. These displays permit examination of the reasons behind the selection of certain vowel symbols for the transcription of the vowels of these English dialects.
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Vowel length plays a phonetic role in the majority of English dialects, and is said to be phonemic in a few dialects, such as Australian English and New Zealand English. In certain dialects of the modern English language, for instance General American, there is allophonic vowel length: vowel phonemes are realized as long vowel allophones before voiced consonant phonemes in the coda of a syllable. Before the Great Vowel Shift, vowel length was phonemically contrastive.
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General Australian English