Many speakers of current Australian English often use a high-rising intonation in statements. This usage, which has been termed Australian Questioning Intonation (AQI), has a nonpropositional, interactive meaning (checking for listener comprehension) and interacts with the turn-taking mechanism of conversation. A quantitative study of the use of AQI in Sydney reveals that it has the social distribution characteristic of a language change in progress: higher rates of usage among working-class speakers, teenagers, and women. Real time data confirm this, showing that the form was almost nonexistent in this speech community two decades earlier. The social motivations of this innovation are examined in terms of local identity and the entry of new ethnic groups into the community, and possible linguistic sources are discussed. The utility of quantitative methods in studying meaningful linguistic variables is demonstrated. (Australian English, language change in progress, intonation, sociolinguistic variation, social class, social motivation) AUSTRALIAN ENGLISH INTONATIONAL CHANGE IN PROGRESS "tone 2 " in Halliday's (1967) analysis of English intonation. In our instrumental studies, it typically showed an Fo rise of at least 40 percent, beginning on the last tonic syllable of the tone group and continuing sharply upwards through any subsequent syllables. We consider these contours to be emically equivalent to the English HRT contours normally used in polar (yes/no) questions. This conclusion is based not only on impressionistic studies, but also on extensive instrumental work by one of us (Vonwiller). In this regard, we are not entirely in agreement with the previous researchers, McGregor and Bryant, who imply there may be a distinctive phonetic quality to these HRTs. While it is possible there are differences of an etic nature, we treat the HRT in declarative clauses in AE as the same tone unit -tone 2 -as the HRT in interrogatives.The relevant syntactic frame in this case is the declarative clause, whether elliptical or not. Thus we are excluding from consideration any HRTs in interrogatives, which would constitute true questions, as well as any imperatives, exclamatives, and so on, where, of course, the HRT would be unlikely to occur anyway. Elliptical declaratives were included even when the clause was reduced to a single word or phrase, as in (1). (Instances of AQI are represented throughout by an upward pointing arrow together with italicizing the portion of the utterance over which the rise occurred. Other intonations are shown by conventional punctuation only.)
