Variability in intervocalic /t/ and community diversity in Australian English

The voiceless alveolar stop /t/ exhibits considerable variation in English. Realisations of /t/ vary depending phonetic context and social factors such as gender, age and socioeconomic status. Generally, studies on Australian English have focused on the “mainstream” variety, without acknowledging the wide range of linguistic diversity speakers are exposed to in contemporary multicultural Australian society. In the present paper, we explore intervocalic /t/ variation in data collected from 183 speakers as part of the Multicultural Australian English – Voices of Sydney corpus. Results show that, in certain phonetic contexts, exposure to community linguistic diversity can affect intervocalic /t/ realisation, with speakers from more diverse areas showing a preference for a single variant (the tap) compared to those from less diverse areas. We interpret this as an example of simplification that can occur in diverse communities where there is extreme variability in ambient language exposure.