Migrants and Australian English: Accents, Attitudes and Perception

Australia has a significant and expanding migrant population coming from a diversity of cultural and linguistic backgrounds. In some cases, these migrants already speak a variety of English; in other cases, they may be second language speakers of English. Australian English (AusE) as a variety has been well-documented (e.g. Cox & Fletcher 2017); however, little is known about how the variety is perceived and experienced by recently-arrived migrants, despite important resulting implications for integration and social cohesion.

Sociolinguistic competence—the ability to recognize variability in language, and be aware of its social significance (Adamson & Regan 1991)—is highly complex, as it requires the capacity to distinguish phonetic, phonological or morpho-syntactic differences, but also the ability to map these differences onto the various social meanings they convey (see Diskin & Levey to appear). Furthermore, there is a question of agency: even if speakers recognise variability, they may consciously or unconsciously resist its reproduction (Sharma 2005; Drummond 2011). This may be dependent on their levels of linguistic security with their own variety, or their prior experiences of having their accentedness positioned and evaluated by others.

This paper reports on language attitudes towards AusE among Irish and Chinese migrants in Melbourne, drawing on a corpus of 24 sociolinguistic interviews collected in 2017 by the authors. Adopting a discourse and content analytic approach, preliminary findings show that Irish migrants were more likely than Chinese migrants to view AusE as ‘marked’; and to be aware of sociolinguistic (particularly sociophonetic) variability in AusE, with descriptions frequently centering on differences of age, gender and ethnicity (rather than regional variability). However, they were also more likely to be resistant to the permeability of their own dialects to AusE, with the Irish accent clearly emerging as an important facet of the Irish migrant identity.

References

Adamson, H.D., & Regan, V. 1991. The Acquisition of community speech norms by Asian immigrants learning English as a second language: A Preliminary study. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 13, 1–22.

Diskin, C. & Levey, S. to appear 2019. Going global and sounding local: Quotative variation and change in L1 and L2 speakers of Irish (Dublin) English. English World-Wide, 40(1).

Drummond, R. 2011. Glottal variation in /t/ in non-native English speech: Patterns of acquisition. English World Wide, 32(3), 280–308.

Cox, F., & Fletcher, J. (2017). Australian English pronunciation and transcription. London; New York; Port Melbourne, VIC: Cambridge University Press.

Sharma, D. 2005. Dialect stabilization and speaker awareness in non-native varieties of English. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 9(2), 194–224.