Language variation and change in a diverse society
Like all languages, Australian English has changed substantially over time. By examining English as spoken in Australia’s largest and most ethnically and linguistically diverse city, the Sydney Speaks project seeks to better understand both the nature of these changes and their social trajectory, such as who leads and who lags in change, and what impact we see from Australia’s changing demographic makeup.
As part of CoEDL, the Sydney Speaks project, led by CI Catherine Travis, compiled a collection of over 150 hours of speech, totalling 1.5 million words, with some 250 Sydneysiders, born from as early as 1890 to as recently as 1990. The speakers capture some of Australia’s diversity. They include Australians of Anglo-Celtic background, as well as second-generation Australians of Chinese, Greek and Italian background. Occupations range from plumbers and hairdressers to university students and teachers, to lawyers and doctors. The stories they tell provide not only linguistic data for analysis, but also social information about experiences over their lifetime, allowing us to use patterns of language variation and change as a window into Australian society over time.
Compiling a corpus of spontaneous speech is a mammoth effort that requires a team of people with diverse skills. Team members are listed below
Catherine Travis - Chief Investigator | Barbara Horvath - Project Advisor |
Simón González - Post-doctoral Fellow | James Grama - Post-doctoral Fellow |
Katrina Hayes - Project Manager | Cale Johnstone - Project Manager |
Benjamin Purser - Lead RA | Heba Bou Orm - PhD Student |
Gan Qiao - PhD Student | Elena Sheard - PhD Student |
Esther Lee - Honours Student | Marcel Reverter-Rambaldi - Honours Student |
Amy Sanson — Honours Student | Carly Bray - Community RA |
Eleni Dimitriadis - Community RA | Anne Dwyer- Community RA |
Baopu He - Community RA | Jennifer Lee - Community RA |
Antonietta Marchetta - Community RA | Hannah Newman - Community RA |
Samantha Poulos - Community RA | Talia Walker - Community RA |
Sam Yuen - Community RA | Arwen Blackwood Ximenes - Transcription RA |
Caroline Cheng - Transcription RA | Charbel El-Khaissi - Transcription RA |
Bonnie McLean - Transcription RA | Renate Plehwe - Transcription RA |
Kira Scaife - Transcription RA | Thomas Wyatt - Transcription RA |
Hero image: The Sydney Opera House. Image: Nico Smit via Unsplash.
Image 1: A map displaying the geographic distribution of speakers included in the Sydney Speaks corpus, colour-coded according to sub-corpora. Image: Cale Johnstone.
Image 2: A timeline of the Sydney Speaks Project participants according to their age and the sub-corpora their stories were included in. Image: Sydney Speaks.
Image 3: A collage of scenes from across the city of Sydney. Images: open sourced.
Image 4: Members of the Sydney Speaks team (L – R) Simon Gonzalez, James Grama, Cale Johnstone and Catherine Travis. Image: CoEDL.
Image 5: Visitors at the “This is a Voice” exhibition at the Powerhouse Museum of Applied Arts & Sciences interact with an app developed by the Sydney Speaks team. Image: CoEDL.
[1]Grama, James, Catherine E. Travis and Simon Gonzalez. 2021. Ethnic variation in real time: Change in Australian English diphthongs. In Hans Van de Velde, Nanna Haug Hilton and Remco Knooihuizen (eds), Studies in Language Variation, 292-314. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. https://www.jbe-platform.com/content/books/9789027259820-silv.25.13gra
[2]Grama, James, Catherine E. Travis and Simon Gonzalez. 2020. Ethnolectal and community change ov(er) time: Word-final (er) in Australian English. Australian Journal of Linguistics 40(3): 346-368. https://doi.org/10.1080/07268602.2020.1823818
[3]Travis, Catherine E. 2021. Ethnolectal variation in real time: Ethnicity, gender and class in Sydney, Australia, Ao Vivo, Abralin (14 July).https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DLEI67i9E-w.
Grama, James, Catherine E. Travis and Simon Gonzalez. 2019. Initiation, progression and conditioning of the short-front vowel shift in Australian English. In Sasha Calhoun, Paola Escudero, Marija Tabain and Paul Warren (eds), Proceedings of the 19th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS), Melbourne, Australia, 1769-1773. Canberra, Australia: Australasian Speech Science and Technology Association Inc. https://assta.org/proceedings/ICPhS2019/papers/ICPhS_1818.pdf
Gonzalez, Simon, James Grama and Catherine E. Travis. 2020. Comparing the performance of forced aligners used in sociophonetic research. Linguistics Vanguard 6(1).https://doi.org/10.1515/lingvan-2019-0058
Purser, Benjamin, James Grama and Catherine E. Travis. 2020. Australian English over time: Using sociolinguistic analysis to inform dialect coaching. Voice and Speech Review 14(3): 269-291. https://doi.org/10.1080/23268263.2020.1750791
Travis, Catherine E. 2021. Sydney Speaks: Examining language variation and change through the stories people tell. Blog post: Sydney Corpus Lab. https://sydneycorpuslab.com/sydney-speaks-examining-language-variation-and-change-through-the-stories-people-tell/