2026/03/29 by James A. Walker, Chloé Diskin-Holdaway, Debbie Loakes +2
Social Sciences · #Australian History and Society #Australian Indigenous Culture and History #Indigenous Health, Education, and Rights
paper · pdf · doi:10.1080/07268602.2026.2620744
openalex publication_date 2026/03/29 · openalex created_date 2026/03/30 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Changes in migration alter the linguistic ecology of countries, giving rise to hybrid social identities and ethnically marked ways of speaking (‘ethnolects’). Studies of Australian English ethnolects focus on linguistic production, but we do not know whether Australians can identify ethnicity based on speech, the social and personal characteristics they attribute to ways of speaking, and what linguistic features they pick up on. We used stimuli extracted from sociolinguistic interviews with residents of Melbourne of different backgrounds in an online verbal-guise test. Results show that listeners do perceive linguistic differences, but their ability to identify specific ethnicities is limited. Listeners rely mostly on phonetic features and their experience with individuals of particular backgrounds. Voices perceived as belonging to older waves of migration are more likely to be judged as being from Australia and speaking English well, and the association of perceived ethnicities with job types reflects socioeconomic changes in migration. Perceptions of ethnically marked ways of speaking Australian English are based on groups with similar timelines of settlement (multi-ethnolects) and intersect with other social characteristics. Coordinating similar studies of production and perception across and outside of Australia will further shed light on the sociolinguistic effects of migration.