Multicultural Australian English – The New Voice of Sydney

Abstract

ABSTRACT Multicultural Australian English – Voices of Sydney (MAE-VoiS) is a project designed to examine the relationship between phonetic variation, community diversity, ethnicity and identity in the Australian context. The MAE-VoiS corpus samples five separate areas in Sydney that vary according to the dominant language backgrounds in the communities (four non-English dominant areas and one English dominant area). The corpus comprises audio recordings of 186 teenagers from 38 language backgrounds who engaged in a picture response elicitation task and a conversation with a peer facilitated by a local research assistant. A total of 42,760 words and short phrases are included in the corpus in addition to 25.47 hours of conversational data incorporating 186,775 words. Participants also completed an extensive Ethnic Orientation Questionnaire and their parents completed a demographic/language survey. The corpus is unique in its focus on adolescent speech collected from participants selected from communities of Sydney that have been under-represented in sociophonetic analyses of Australian English. The main aim of the project is to provide source material for analyses that will ultimately allow us to forge a new model of Australian English that embraces difference, acknowledging the contribution of all spoken varieties in the representation of Australian identity.