Regional Distribution of the /el/-/æl/ Merger in Australian English
Steven Coats1, Chloé Diskin-Holdaway2, and Debbie Loakes2
1University of Oulu, Finland; 2University of Melbourne, Australia
steven.coats@oulu.fi
12th VarDial Workshop, أبو ظبي
January 19th, 2025
Traditional view: Regional variation is limited. "Australia is, generally speaking, linguistically unified" (Mitchell & Delbridge 1965: 13)
AusE has “begun to exhibit more widespread social and regional variation than has previously been acknowledged” (Cox and Fletcher, 2017, p. 20)
This study: Investigation of regional variation of prelateral merger of /e/ and [æ] in a large dataset
Prelateral merger of /e/ and [æ] (e.g., celery = salary, Ellen = Alan)
Investigated in small-scale studies in Southern Victoria/Melbourne (Diskin et al. 2017; Diskin-Holdaway et al., 2024; Loakes et al., 2017, 2024)
What about in large datasets and in other locations?
DB=−log∫√P(x)⋅Q(x)dx
for two multivariate probability distributions P and Q (i.e., f1,f2 for /e/ and /æ/)
We then calculate the difference between the two contexts at each location:
DiffB=DvC−DvL
Moran's I (Moran 1950): Takes into account attribute values at all locations in a dataset and summarizes the overall extent of spatial correlation
Getis-Ord G*i (Getis & Ord, 1992; Ord & Getis, 1995): Identifies spatial clusters by evaluating the values at each location in the dataset in comparison with neighboring locations, in relation to the global dataset
Bhattacharyya, A. (1943). On a measure of divergence between two statistical populations defined by their probability distribution. Bulletin of the Calcutta Mathematical Society 35, 99–110.
Boersma, P. and Weenink, D. (2024). Praat: Doing phonetics by computer.
Bredin, H. (2023). pyannote.audio 2.1 speaker diarization pipeline: Principle, benchmark, and recipe.In INTERSPEECH 2023, 1983-1987.
Coats, S. (2024a). Building a searchable online corpus of Australian and New Zealand aligned speech. Australian Journal of Linguistics.
Coats, S. (2024b). CoANZSE Audio: Creation of an online corpus for linguistic and phonetic snalysis of Australian and New Zealand Englishes. In Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024), 3407-3412.
Cox, F. and Fletcher, J. (2017). Australian English pronunciation and transcription, 2 edition. Cambridge University Press.
Diskin, C., Loakes, D., Billington, R., Stoakes, H., Gonzalez, S., and Kirkham, S. (2019). The /el-/æl/ merger in Australian English: Acoustic and articulatory insights. In Proceedings of the 19th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, Melbourne, Australia 2019, pp. 1764–1768.
Diskin-Holdaway, C., Loakes, D., and Clothier, J. (2024). Variability in cross-language and cross-dialect perception. How Irish and Chinese migrants process Australian English vowels. Phonetica, 81(1):1–41.
Getis, A. and Ord, J. K. (1992). The Analysis of Spatial Association by Use of Distance Statistics. Geographical Analysis 24, 189-206.
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Loakes, D., Clothier, J., Hajek, J., and Fletcher, J. (2024). Sociophonetic variation in vowel categorization of Australian English. Language and Speech 67(3), 870–906.
Loakes, D., Hajek, J., and Fletcher, J. (2017). Can you t[æ]ll I’m from M[æ]lbourne? English World-Wide, 38(1), 29–49.
McAuliffe, M., Socolof, M., Mihuc, S., Wagner, M., and Sonderegger, M. (2017). Montreal Forced Aligner: Trainable text-speech alignment using Kaldi. In Proceedings of the 18th Conference of the International Speech Communication Association, 498-502.
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Moran, P. A. P. (1950). Notes on Continuous Stochastic Phenomena. Biometrika 37, 17-23.
Ord, J. K. and Getis, A. (1995). Local Spatial Autocorrelation Statistics: Distributional Issues and an Application. Geographical Analysis 27, 286-306.
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Traditional view: Regional variation is limited. "Australia is, generally speaking, linguistically unified" (Mitchell & Delbridge 1965: 13)
AusE has “begun to exhibit more widespread social and regional variation than has previously been acknowledged” (Cox and Fletcher, 2017, p. 20)
This study: Investigation of regional variation of prelateral merger of /e/ and [æ] in a large dataset
Prelateral merger of /e/ and [æ] (e.g., celery = salary, Ellen = Alan)
Investigated in small-scale studies in Southern Victoria/Melbourne (Diskin et al. 2017; Diskin-Holdaway et al., 2024; Loakes et al., 2017, 2024)
What about in large datasets and in other locations?
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