‘This is an Australian ahhccent’: Performed speech in Bondi Hipsters

As Bell and Gibson (2011) highlight, the language used in staged performance has great potential to tell us about the social meanings of linguistic features within a speech community. One example of staged language in the contemporary Australian context is the performance of

“hipster speech”, as used in the Bondi Hipsters sketches of recent ABC comedy series Soul Mates (Van Vuuren & Van Vuuren, 2014). During this performance, certain phonetic variants are selected, exaggerated, and deployed alongside other modalities (e.g. dress, mannerisms, settings) to construct recognisable “hipster” personae (see e.g. Eckert, 2016).

This talk reports on a preliminary auditory and acoustic analysis of the phonetic variants used to perform Australian hipster characters, including discussion of some of the social meanings potentially associated with these variants. Data for this analysis are taken from a radio interview in which actors Christiaan Van Vuuren and Nick Boshier appear, in character as Bondi Hipsters, then as themselves, allowing for comparison of the variants used in each context. The most striking feature of the actors’ “hipster” speech is systematic retraction and lengthening of the vowel /æ/, realised [ɐː] (even in pre-nasal contexts, where raising of this vowel is typically seen; Cox & Palethorpe, 2007). Alongside this change, fellow front monophthong /e/ lowers, while the central vowels /ɐ/ and /ɐː/ raise and retract. Such vowel changes are highly salient for the performers and their audience, both of whom represent them orthographically on social media (see examples in Figure 1). Some possible social meanings associated with use of these variants, given what is already documented concerning similar vowel changes underway in Australian English, are the “young”, “innovative”, and “urban” aspects of hipster identity. This work demonstrates the value of considering non-traditional sources of linguistic data, such as broadcast entertainment media, in the study of Australian English(es).

References

Bell, A., & Gibson, A. (2011). Staging language: An introduction to the sociolinguistics of performance. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 15(5), 555-572.

Cox, F., & Palethorpe, S. (2007). Australian English. Journal of the International Phonetic Association, 37(3), 341-350.

Eckert, P. (2016). Third Wave Variationism. Oxford Handbooks Online. Oxford University Press.

Van Vuuren, C. & Van Vuuren, C. (2014). Soul Mates [TV series]. Sydney, NSW: Australian

Broadcasting Corporation.