Voices of Sydney
What is English like in different parts of Sydney?
Multicultural Australian English: The New Voice of Sydney is a project funded under the Australian Research Council Future Fellowship scheme awarded to Professor Felicity Cox.
The aim of the project is to help us understand the speech patterns of young people from complex culturally and linguistically diverse communities across Sydney. Understanding how adolescents from different ethnicities use speech patterns to symbolically express their diverse sociocultural identities offers a window into understanding a rapidly changing Australian society.
Australia is one of the most ethnically diverse countries in the world. Yet the complex relationship between how we speak and cultural diversity is not known for 21st century multicultural Australia.
This Australian Research Council funded project aims to help us understand the characteristics of spoken language used by Sydney adolescents from a range of ethnic backgrounds. The project will inform theories of language variation, ethnicity and identity, and help to provide a framework for supporting sociocultural cohesion in Australia.
Multicultural Australian English: Voices of Sydney Corpus
The Corpus consists of recordings of the voices of 184 teenagers (aged between 15 and 16 – 88 males, 94 females, 2 non-binary) from schools in five areas of Sydney that vary according to the language backgrounds that predominate in the community.
The areas sampled were:
- Cabramatta/Fairfield
- Canterbury/Bankstown
- the Inner West (Strathfield/Homebush)
- Parramatta/Hills district
- the Northern Beaches.
Two speaking tasks were completed for each participant:
- a picture naming task
- a conversation with another participant facilitated by a research assistant.
Participants and their parents also completed comprehensive demographic surveys to provide details of language background, ethnicity, family history and community participation.
If you’d like to participate in one of our studies of English in Australia, complete our survey.
For more information about the project, contact:
Related publications
- Gibson, A., Penney, J. & Cox, F. (2022). Rhoticity and hiatus breaking in Australian English: Associations with community diversity. Proceedings of the Australasian International Conference on Speech Science and Technology, Canberra, 46–50.
- Penney, J., Cox, F., Gibson, A. (2023). Variation in FACE and FLEECE trajectories in Australian English adolescents according to community language diversity. Proceedings of the 20th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, Prague, 3522–3526.
- White, H., Penney, J., Gibson, A., Szakay, A. & Cox F. (2023). Convergence of creaky voice use in Australian English. Proceedings of the International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, Prague, 1791–1795.
- White, H., Penney, J., Gibson, A., Szakay, A. & Cox, F. (2023). Creak prevalence and prosodic context in Australian English. Proceedings of INTERSPEECH, Dublin, 112–116.