New News Old News: A Sociophonetic Study of Spoken Australian English in News Broadcast Speech

The notion of language as a marker of identity is usefully explored in relation to news broadcast language. News readers' speech, like all spoken language, is subject to change over time, and radio and television bulletins have been recording this process for as long as the technology has allowed. Evidence of Australia's evolution from colonial outpost to independent nation can be heard in the speech of its newsreaders, who in the mid 1940s began to move away from the RIP accent that had been adopted along with the BBC model of broadcasting. This article presents some findings of research into those aspects of Australian newsreaders' speech which indicate change most clearly, i.e. vowel quality and intonation. Instrumental analyses conducted on data collected from three speaker groups suggest that whereas vowels have clearly shifted away from RP-like accents towards 'General' and even 'Broad' accents of Australian English, American-sounding intonation patterns may be developing in the speech of certain commercial FM radio newsreaders, contrary to what is stated in the literature.