Falling diphthongs

What is most characteristic of AusE with respect to the falling diphthongs is the [ɔ] pronunciation of the CURE vowel. This is especially so for the lexical item sure but is frequent for all words containing the CURE vowel. There is very little differentiation in the articulation of the falling diphthongs among the three varieties. The first target is close to the corresponding lax monophthongs /ɪ ε ʊ/ and the offset ends near the /æ a/ vowel space. The pronunciation actually varies from a fully two-targeted variant, to a diphthongal variant (having an offglide), to a long monophthongal variant. Although Harrington, Cox and Evans (1997) found only a small number of monophthongal variants in their study, they suggest that this may be an artefact of the corpus.