Melbourne English: A New Corpus

As the ethnolinguistic composition of Melbourne’s English-speaking population has changed considerably. In the past 50 years, sociolinguistics has begun to pay attention to newer varieties of Melbourne English spoken by the descendants of more recent waves of immigration. However, these studies lacking a principled basis of comparison, the English spoken by descendants of the old-line “Anglo-Celtic” population. In this paper we describe an ongoing project collecting sociolinguistic interviews in two suburbs that have not seen substantial changes in their ethnolinguistic composition and that are distinguished by their social class (one middle class, one working class). Speakers are further stratified by sex and generation. We illustrate the informal nature of the data collected and its representativeness of what is currently known about Melbourne English.