Australian English (AusE) is increasingly understood in terms of its regional variation. There are now many papers that show clear regional variation in AusE vowels in a variety of contexts (e.g. Billington 2011, Cox and Palethorpe 2003, Loakes et al 2014). Whilst there are clear indications of regional variation in vowel production, there is little experimental data available from outside the southern part of the county. Examining the vowels of speakers at one of the northernmost extremities of the country (northern Queensland) will increase our understanding of the Australian vowel system and will provide an interesting counterpoint to the current discussion of regional variation in AusE. This present study provides acoustic data of formant frequency values for monophthongs from young adults from northern Queensland. Speakers (10 female, 7 male) read 13 AusE vowels in the fully stressed /hVd/ contexts and were analysed utilising EMU (Winkelmann et al., 2017). Vowel targets were identified using Cox’s (2006) protocols. Formant plots were then created from the data based on mean F1 and F2 values. These values were then compared to Billington (2011), Butcher (2006) and Cox (2006) to ascertain regional difference and where appropriate statistical analysis performed. As a result, it is evident that speakers from northern Queensland have a significantly different vowel space than speakers from the southern part of the country. In particular there is an increased vowel space that results from a fronted /i:/, lowered /æ/ and retracted /o:/. As a consequence there is clear evidence for the presence of regional vowel characteristics particular to northern Queensland speakers.

Billington, R. 2011. Location, Location, Location! Regional characteristics and national patterns of change in the vowels of Melbourne adolescents. Australian Journal of Linguistics 31(3), 275–303.

Butcher, A. 2006. Formant frequencies of /hVd/ vowels in the speech of South Australian females. Proceedings of the 11th Australasian International Conference on Speech Science and Technology Auckland. 449–453.

Cox, F. 2006. The acoustic characteristics of /hVd/ vowels in the speech of some Australian teenagers. Australian Journal of Linguistics 26(2), 147–179.

Cox, F., Palethorpe, S. 2004. The border effect: Vowel differences across the NSW-Victorian border. Proceedings 2003 Conference Australian Linguistics Society Newcastle. 1–27.

Loakes,D., Hajek,J., Clothier,J., Fletcher,J. 2014. Identifying /el/-/æl/: A comparison between two regional Australian towns. Proceedings of the 15th Australasian International Conference on Speech Science and Technology Christchurch. 41–44.

Winkelmann, R., Harrington, J., Jänsch, K. 2017. EMU-SDMS: Advanced speech database management and analysis in R. Computer Speech & Language 45(Supplement C), 392–410.