The Evolution Of Australian English
It would be difficult to think of any other country in which one could travel the "vast distances that separate Sydney from Perth, and Darwin from Hobart, and encounter so relatively little regional variation. A number of historical explanations have been advanced to account for this homogeneity. The most plausible is generally considered to be the ‘Sydney Mixing Bowl’ theory supported by evidence of a high degree of population mobility. Bernard argues that AusE began with the first generation of native-born Australians, a byproduct of the social situation in the early colony. The new dialect, whose accent Bernard labels ‘proto-Broad’, provided the basis for the accent varieties which developed consequently, in response to antagonistic social evaluations of protoBroad and an opinion by Australians that with growing prosperity and education their speech needed ‘upgrading’. Bernard accounts for the homogeneity of AusE via the independent generation of proto-Broad in the regional centres that developed from coastal ports. Unconventional positions are argued by scholars like Hammarström (1980) and Gunn (1992), who believe that a uniform London English was transplanted to Australia in 1788 and that speakers of other dialects quickly adapted to it, and Horvath (1985), who provides a sociolinguistic reconstruction of AusE based on a historical reconstruction of the social conditions in the colony. Horvath observes the presence of sharp socio-economic differences in the colony, predicting that there would have been extensive linguistic variation from the outset. Horvath also rejects Bernard’s explanation of the uniformity of AusE, arguing that the social circumstances in the major coastal centres would have varied greatly (New South Wales and Tasmania having been convict colonies while Victoria, South Australia, and Western Australia were not), and would have been unlikely to lead consistently to a unique set of linguistic features. Horvath’s preferred clarification for the uniformity of AusE is based on the extensive population mobility that is attested to in the historical records.
While the study of the historical development of AusE first began to gather momentum in the 1960s, it has more recently enjoyed an upsurge of interest with the posthumous editing of A. G. Mitchell’s unfi nished ms by Yallop (see Yallop 2001) and such publications as Leitner (2004) and Fritz (2007). While the focus has traditionally been primarily lexical (e. g. Ramson 1966) and phonological (e. g. Mitchell & Delbridge 1965), some recent research has examined diachronic dimensions of AusE morphosyntax (see for example Peters, Collins & Smith 2009).
The English language arrived in Australia a little more than 200 years ago and since that time it has been levelled, sculpted and adapted to give Australians a specific dialect. "When you trace the story of Australian English from 1788 to the present day, you find yourself actually tracing the story of the whole nation, " Richards told 702 ABC Sydney's Dominic Knight.
Beyond the influences and movements that shaped our use and understanding of English, Richards said we first needed to consider our concept of language. "They now say there is no such thing as English, the English language doesn't exist, there are only Englishes, only dialects. "We have our dialects and as it happens, quite by coincidence, it is the best, most colourful, most inventive English dialect on the planet. "Richards has studied and interpreted the language's history and documented it in his new book, The Story of Australian English.
The beginnings of the Australian accent
According to Richards, the beginning of our Australian accent emerged following the arrival of European settlers in 1788. "It emerged from a process called levelling down because you had all these people who came here on 11 ships from different dialect areas, regional dialect areas across England, " he said. "They all spoke differently and they used different words and what they had to do, in order to communicate with each other, was to level their dialect variations down. "
Around 50 years after the colony was established, Richards said English people arriving in Australia started to claim that Australians were speaking the "purest English on earth". This discovery period of other ways of speaking and other words for things brought an acute awareness of the language and sound. "What our accent really is, is English with the dialect variations taken out. "We now think of it as being our dialect, and it is, but that's what was happening in those early days, it happened really fast. "Language 'ambushed' by elocution movementsAbout 100 years on from the First Fleet, Richards said the arrival of the elocution movement in the 1880s and 1890s "ambushed" our language and changed it for good. "It started off on how to annunciate and speak clearly but what they did was pick one dialect, standard southern English, and they said 'that is correct'.
Standard southern English came to be what is called RP, Received Pronunciation, Oxbridge, that kind of accent. That was right, everything else was wrong. According to Richards, before this time general, middle Australian accents were predominant before cultivated and broad Australian accents arrived later, as a reaction to the elocution movement. The story of our language, from 1788 to the present day, is actually the story of the nation. The evidence for this is that in the late 1950s, researchers went out and tape recorded some elderly people in their 80s and 90s who had been born in the far west of New South Wales and some of them in Tasmania. They all had general, middle Australian accents because when they were born in the 1880s and 1890s. There was no broad Australian, there was no cultivated Australian, it hadn't happened yet. Population movements from the early military colony days to the stock industry, gold rushes and onwards undoubtedly had an impact on the variations in accent across the country.
However, Richards said perhaps not to the degree seen in other countries. "If you look at what happened in America, the Pilgrim Fathers landed at Plymouth Rock and they stayed there and built up that colony. "Another group of English people landed at Savannah, in Georgia, and they built up that colony and they remained in these isolated colonies for about 100 years. "They developed their own vocabulary, their own accents, hence the range of accents in America. "
The Lexicon
The Australian lexicon embodies the attitudes, values and self-perception of Australians, as evidenced in the preservation of value-laden words such as mateship (a code of conduct built upon solidarity and fellowship between males) and larrikin (a mischievous young person). A widely recognized feature lexicon is its informality, often manifested in an understated and irreverent humour (for instance in similes such as drunk as a skunk ‘very drunk’, and tight as a fish’s arsehole ‘parsimonious’). Australians are renowned for their colloquial creativity, sometimes generating sets of vulgar expressions built on a single stem: scared shitless ‘very scared’; shit a brick! an expression of surprise; up shit creek ‘in a difficult predicament’; built like a brick shithouse ‘strongly built’; bullshit artist ‘one who tells lies’; and shit-faced ‘drunk’. It is observed by Leitner (2004) that the Australian penchant for such colloquial usage transcends the merely covert prestige enjoyed by its counterparts in British and American English.
The affinity shown by Australians for their vernacular can be traced back to the often coarse and irreverent language, originating in British dialectal slang, used by both the convicts and settlers from 1788. In Australia, as elsewhere, it has traditionally been males who swear more and use more obscene language than females. At the time of Taylor’s (1976) study of swearing and abusive language in AusE, he was able to identify persistently marked gender differences, though it is clear that the gap between male and female use and attitudes has narrowed somewhat since the 1970s. Australians again evidence a good deal of creativity, as for example in the colorful compounds that are used to derogate others (e. g. shithead, deadshit, shitkicker, bullshitter; arsehole, arse-licker, smartarse, slackarse, tightarse) and the comparative expressions that are used to target people’s physical appearance, mental ability, or various other character traits (e. g. ugly as a shithouse rat; as popular as a turd in a fruit salad; lower than a snake’s belly; silly as a chook with its head cut off.
Swearing also serves as a means of reinforcing in-group solidarity in AusE. For example the use of bastard in affectionate phrases such as old bastard and silly bastard in AusE represents one application of the principle enunciated by Allan and Burridge (2009) that “the more affectionate they feel towards someone, the more abusive the language can be towards that person”. Perhaps the most extreme manifestation of the solidarity function is ‘ritual insulting’, as exemplified in exchanges of the following type: A: If I had a pussy like yours I’d take it to the cat’s home and have it put down. B: If I had brains like yours I’d ask for a refund. Another common function of swearing in AusE is discourse-stylistic. The swearword most closely associated with this function in AusE is the ‘great Australian adjective’, bloody. In the following corpus examples from Allan & Burridge, bloody is used merely as an intensifier, bleached of its taboo quality and without its standard force: It’s a bloody crocodile!; You’re driving too bloody fast!; It’s turned bloody red!.
A significant lexical development in recent decades has been the borrowing of words and expressions such as cookie, guy, and dude from American English, prompted by rapid developments in communication and American cultural imperialism. Opinions differ as to the nature and extent of American influence on contemporary AusE. Members of the public and journalists regularly suggest that AusE is merely a passive receptacle for Americanisms, while linguists tend to regard Australian borrowings from American English as selective. Taylor’s (1989) research shows that American English influence on AusE has by no means been limited to the lexical level. Phonologically, Taylor notes, there has been a tendency for the stress patterns in certain words to move from a traditional British to an American pattern. Simplification of digraphs such as and as in medieval and fetal follows American practice. Syntactically, Taylor notes, amongst other things, the American-influenced elision of the in structures of the type I play (the) piano.
Another development that has affected the lexicon in recent decades is the influx of words associated with Aboriginal culture that reflects the development of Aboriginal activism and a growing interest in Aboriginal languages and culture amongst white Australians. Examples include native title and Mabo, which entered AusE following the High Court’s decision in 1992 to recognize the claim by Koiki Mabo, a Mer islander from the Torres Strait, that his people’s land had been illegally annexed by Queensland.
