Australian Indian English: Contact-Induced Adaptation in the Perception of Vowel Categories

Abstract

Increased global mobility has intensified contact between regional English varieties, creat ing newopportunities for large‑scale second dialect acquisition. Australia, with its rapidly growing population due to migration, offers a particularly dynamic context for explor ing such contact. This study investigates how first‑generation Indian migrants in the Aus tralian city of Melbourne perceive Australian English vowels in the lexical items DRESS and TRAP, a contrast chosen because of sound changes that are well‑documented for this loca tion. Listeners completedavowelcategorizationtaskinvolvingtargetwordsinnon‑lateral andlateral contexts. Toassesscontact‑inducedadaptation, theirresponseswerecompared with those of Australian English speakers in Australia and those of Indian English speak ers in India. The results reveal that perceptual adaptation among first‑generation Indian migrants in Australia is context‑dependent. In the non‑lateral coda context, migrant In dian English listeners (in Australia) showed intermediate responses, between those of Aus tralian English listeners (in Australia) and Indian English listeners (in India), indicative of a relatively ‘linear’ adaptation towards Australian English. Responses to stimuli in the lateral coda context, however, revealed a more complex picture. Australian English lis teners (in Australia) and Indian English listeners (in India) responded more closely to one another than migrant Indian English listeners (in Australia), with the latter instead exhibit ing asubstantial degree of perceptual confusion toward the endpoint of the continuum for hell–Hal and, to a lesser extent, for shell–shall and pell–pal. These findings suggest that in the perceptual adaptation to a second dialect, the acquisition of a wider pool of phonetic variants is mediated by the acquisition of structural knowledge.