/t/ Production in Mainstream and Aboriginal Australian Englishes in Warrnambool and Mildura: A Sociophonetic Acoustic Study

Abstract

A sociophonetic study of coda /t/ in Australian Englishes spoken in Warrnambool and Mildura, Victoria, Australia, is described. A total of 2112 coda /t/ tokens produced by 61 adult L1 speakers was analyzed using auditory and acoustic profiling, focusing on four social factors (location, dialect, age and gender). The corpus included 33 Aboriginal English and 28 Mainstream Australian English speakers (24 male, 37 female) who fell into roughly equal age groups of 40 years. Overall, the “canonical” (aspirated) variant [th] was most frequently observed, followed by affricate [ts] and pre-glottalized [ˀt]; these variants accounted for 79% of all tokens. As for sociophonetic patterning, the best-fi..