The social distribution of Broad, General and Cultivated varieties of AusE

The earliest work on AusE by Mitchell and Delbridge and the acoustic studies of Bernard presented the phonological continuum as one with little association with social or geographical boundaries. Much work since the 1960s has been done to investigate whether such is the case (Horvath 1985; Bradley 1989; Cox and Palethorpe 2001). Certainly regional variation is being found for a number of phonological features and Horvath’s study of Sydney English drew attention to the social class, gender and ethnic correlates of the Broad, General and Cultivated continuum.