The Cambridge History of the English Language Volume 5 Part 6 pptx

English in Australia

account to refine the description of sociolinguistic variation (Shopen

1978; Martino 1982; Horvath 1985). Even regional variation may prove

to be more prevalent than previously supposed when finer methods are

used (e.g. in Jernudd 1973) and social variation taken into account.

Work on Melbourne English is currently being advanced by D. and M.

Bradley (see Bradley 1979, 1989; Bradley & Bradley 1979).

It is an important question how far the acrolect, Cultivated Australian

English, is passively understood by most Australians. To make it so is an

aim of education, and the results of public examinations may be

regarded as expensive large-scale research projects to quantify the

success of this aim. In its written form the acrolect approximates to

standard written English, opening an immense world of experience to

those who master it. But such understanding, even of the spoken forms,

varies in thoroughness and cannot be taken for granted. Australian

soldiers in 1915 are said to have found the ' high-falutin' speech of their

British officers ' hard to understand' and ' got into a lot of strife' (that is

'trouble') for laughing at their commands (Facey 1981: 249).

Broadcasting has probably brought increased passive familiarity with

variation in accent, though in general Australians are not much

consciously aware of such differences. Few make the efforts many

English do to change from one type of accent to another. Donald Home

(1975: 201) was an exception but there is an ironical intention in his

account of his feeling that 'it seemed a negation of education to speak

" like an Australian " ' and in the description of his private practising of

diphthongs until from the security of an achieved acrolect he could

defend the view 'that there was nothing wrong with the Australian

accent; it was just that some of us did not happen to use it'.

6.3 Morphology and syntax

6.3.1 General

Morphology and syntax have been comparatively neglected in Aus￾tralian English studies. Comments tend to be sporadic: for example,

Australian -ie/-j and -o terminations (e.g. Johnny/Johnno) are discussed by

Ridge (1984: 336-8), and there is a small Australian input into Matsuda's

(1982) study of variation between out and out of in such contexts as'looked

out {of) the window', but in general there appears to be much the same

range of formal and informal choices as in southern England. Variations

are easier to record than phonological variants but the likelihood that

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George W. Turner

literary preconceptions will colour the observations of literary in￾formants is greater. Did Mrs Clacy really hear a waterman say in 1852

' times isn't as they used to was' (1963:15) or a man on the goldfields cry

out' 'Ere's happles, happles, Vandemonian happles, and them as dislikes

the hiland needn't heat them' {ibid.: 86) ? Catherine Helen Spence (1971:

63-4) is more plausible describing a woman in Adelaide about 1854

whose 'accent and manners were unmistakeably vulgar' (and whose

daughter was accordingly denied access to a good Adelaide school)

saying 'she cries dreadful' or 'in the bush people gets so rough'. Such

literary evidence could be multiplied. It is evidence of the variety of

grammatical forms brought to the mixing bowl in the new country and

presumably surviving to an extent that is only beginning to be measured.

Research using computers and quantitative methods is beginning to

address this question. A survey of speech in Queensland was already

made over a quarter of a century ago (Flint 1964; Turner 1966: 123-7).

More recently Corbett & Ahmad (1986) describe a corpus of texts from

The Age (Melbourne) amounting to 100,000 words, being editorials

from September 1980 to January 1981 and available from ICAME, the

International Computer Archive for Modern English in Bergen,

Norway. In Sydney, David Blair and Peter Collins are compiling a data

base designed to be comparable with a corpus of a million running

words made at Brown University in the United States, and a matching

corpus, built on the same mix of varieties, at the University of Lancaster

in England. The mix of varieties can be matched except that there is a

time lag of some quarter of a century between the Brown corpus and its

Sydney counterpart.

6.3.2 Morphology

As already noticed, there is a problem of demarcation between

morphology and phonology in accounting for forms like /grouan/ for

grown but not groan, or spanner ' a wrench' and, with lengthened vowel,

'something that spans'.

There may be variation between past-tense and past-participle forms

with the use of a standard past-participle form as a finite verb / seen him,

or conversely He mighfve took them. These and other variants in inner

Sydney speech were studied statistically by Edina Eisikovits (1987).

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6.3.3 Syntax

Like morphological deviants, unusual syntactic patterns are normally

noticed (though many people are unaware of the difficulty of parsing the

frequently heard If I'd've known; which is not the Dutch and German

English If I would have known since, asked to expand, speakers are apt to

fumble with If I had have...).

The Melbourne survey (Corbett & Ahmad 1986) brought to light an

interesting variation between British and Australian use of the optional

concord between nouns of multitude like committee and their verbs {the

committee has/have decided). Plural agreement in such instances was found

to be markedly less common in Australian than in British English. Is

there a social insight here? Do we tolerate varying views less and like

our political bodies to be monolithic ?

A much-noticed syntactic feature of Australian English is sentence￾terminal but as in ' Funny old bag. I quite like her but' (Jolley 1983:102).

Trudgill (1984: 26) found that this construction is not even understood

in southern England, though it is known in many dialects in Scotland,

Northern Ireland and the north-east of England.

6.4 Lexis: history

6.4.1 The Aboriginal languages

If the history of language in Australia, currently thought in the more

conservative estimates to span about 40,000 years, is reduced in

imagination to a period of twenty-four hours, the share of English, on

the same scale, is about seven minutes. Yet in that short time the

language of the pink strangers has replaced most of the original

languages, usually without even recording them.

The first English settlers in Australia neglected to name the human

part of the landscape. Cook refers to the original inhabitants as

'Natives', Tench as 'natives' or 'Indians'. As the Australian-born

descendants of European settlers later appropriated the name natives for

themselves and in 1871 formed an Australian Natives' Association with

a tendency to a ' white Australia' policy and advocacy (too late to save

the Aboriginal people) of restricted immigration, no term was left. The

general English term aboriginal or aborigine was commandeered, often

until recently without even a capital letter. Now the Australian

government's Style Manual recommends the forms Aboriginal (singular

George W. Turner

noun), Aboriginals (plural noun) and Aboriginal (adjective). Aborigines is

given as an alternative plural, but the singular use of Aborigine is not

recommended (though in fact it is not uncommon). The Aboriginal

people themselves seem not to favour the name Aboriginals, which now

takes on a suggestion of government, and in practice seem to use the

whole phrase Aboriginal people however often it occurs in discourse. It is

not ideal since seven-syllabled terms in common use tend to be slurred

or abbreviated. Some Aboriginal people prefer the term Koori (adjective

and noun) for an Aboriginal but it is especially an east-coast word. In

south-west Australia, for example, the equivalent word would be

Nyungar. The termgubba for 'white man' is colloquial and derogatory so

that Koori andgubba cannot pretend to unite the races in the way that the

phrase Maori and Pakeha attempts to do for New Zealand. Perhaps the

best we can do at present is the crude two-colour spectrum separating

the bronzed from the rubicund as blackfellow and whitefellow.

There were about 200 Aboriginal languages (Dixon 1980: 1). It is not

easy to count them; sometimes differences are small enough to suggest

dialects rather than separate languages, but the differences are important

to Aboriginal people as they indicate tribal affiliation (Dixon 1980: 33).

A language might be named by a distinctive word, as if we were to label

Scots as ' the language with bonny'. If the word for no is wira, the language

is Wiradhuri' wira-having' (Donaldson & Donaldson 1985: 77). In the

Western Desert a language distinguished by having pitjantja as the word

for ' come' is distinguished by the name Pitjantjatjara (pitjant/a-hzving),

and neighbouring Ngaanyatjara is distinguished by its word for 'this',

ngaanya. The word for 'this' in Nyanganyatjara is nyanganya. Guugu

Yimidhirr is literally 'the language havingyimi "this"' (Dixon 1980:

41-2).

These names may be used in English contexts but most are not

common except in the works of anthropologists and linguists. Some￾times a tribal name is well enough known to have a standard form

different from the modern linguists' more accurate rendition of the

native word. Examples are Aranda and Kamilaroi which, if spelt in

accordance with the modern spelling of these languages, would be

Arirnta and Camilaraay.

Like classical European languages, Aboriginal languages usually

have inflections showing case, tense and mood, but there are differences,

notably in the frequent presence of an ergative case marking what is in

our terms the subject of a transitive verb. Some sounds which seem to be

almost universal in better-known languages are missing in most

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Aboriginal languages, for example the sounds represented by/, s, sh or ^

in English. Thus a Western Desert word for a (nursing) sister disguises

its English origin in the form tjitja (Douglas 1977: 3) where //'represents

a palatal stop. No distinction is made in most Aboriginal languages

between voiced and unvoiced stops (b, d,g against/), /, k), so that a given

word might variously be spelt in the Roman alphabet or Anglicised with

b otp, dot t,got k. The place-name Coober Pedy can be derived from the

Gugada language guba bidi 'white man's holes', and Gugada itself can

equally well be called Kukata (Platt 1972: 1). Similarly Pitjantjatjara or

Pitjantjara may appear as Bidjandjara {ibid.). Anthropologists in the

Eastern States tend to favour spelling with b, d,g while South Australians

favour/), /, k (Dixon 1980: 138).

Words in most Aboriginal languages have to end in a vowel. When

the English word missus is borrowed as a word for 'white woman', it

takes the form mitjitji (Douglas 1977: 3). The words quoted in the

previous paragraph follow the rule of the terminal vowel, as do a

number of words borrowed into English, kangaroo, woomera 'a "throw￾ing stick" used to launch a dart or spear', brolga 'a large crane', bora

'a male initiation site', and such place-names as Wagga Wagga, Gundagai,

Wodonga, Ernabella or the fictitious Bullamakanka. There were excep￾tions, however, and these seem to have been especially numerous in

areas where the main cities were destined to arise, the areas best known

to later Australians. In New South Wales words could end in a velar

nasal, so that boomerang or currawong' a crow-like bird', or billabong' a cut￾off pool in a river branch', or the name Goolagong, 'sound Aboriginal'.

The name of an Aboriginal protege of Governor Phillip, Bennelong,

commemorated in the name Bennelong Point, now the site of the Sydney

Opera House, is another example. In Victoria names like Ballarat or

Mordialloc end in consonants. In south-western Australia many names

end in -up, so that the name qualup bell for a shrub, based on a local name

in that area, has an authentic local flavour. Another fictitious name for a

remote outback locality, Woop Woop, sounds Aboriginal in its re￾duplication but it is not especially associated with Western Australia and

so is dubiously Aboriginal in flavour. A possible source is Whoop-up, the

name of a backwoods American goldmining town in E. L. Wheeler's

once popular Deadivood Dick on Deck, a form, oddly enough, which

might, if unchanged, have fitted the Western Australian pattern quite

well.

It is a general principle that when two languages come into contact,

words borrowed by one language from another ' show a superiority of

George W. Turner

the nation from whose language they are borrowed, though this

superiority may be of many different kinds' (Jespersen 1922: 209). In

accordance with this principle, just as their ancestors learned little from

the despised Celts and their remoter ancestors on the continent

contributed little to the superior Romans, the technologically dominant

English took from the Aboriginal languages less than they gave. The

earliest borrowings were from the languages first encountered in the

area round Port Jackson. Examples from the Dharuk language of this

area include boobook ' a type of owl', boomerang, cooee, dingo, gibber ' stone,

rock', gin 'Aboriginal woman', gunya 'Aboriginal hut', hielamon,

' shield', koala, koradji' tribal doctor', kurrajong ' a tree, especially of the

genus Brachychiton'', nulla-nulla 'an Aboriginal club', wallaby 'small

kangaroo', wallaroo ' mountain kangaroo', waratah ' red-flowering tree',

emblem of New South Wales, warrigal' (especially wild) native dog or

dingo', wombat 'burrowing marsupial', wonga-wonga '(1) a kind of

pigeon, (2) a vine' and woomera. As settlement advanced there were

further borrowings from the more easterly languages. From Wiradhuri

come billabong and corella ' white cockatoo' and from other New South

Wales sources bilby ' rabbit bandicoot', budgerigar, mulga ' an acacia', also

'the outback', and (from Kamilaroi) yarran also 'an acacia'. Other

words were borrowed in Victoria {bunyip' mythical river monster', lowan

'mallee-fowl, a large mound-building bird', luderick 'black-fish', mallee

' scrubby eucalypt', mia-mia' an Aboriginal hut', andyabby' a freshwater

crustacean') or from Queensland (barramundi 'giant perch', humpy

' Aboriginal hut \yakka' work') or from South Australia (callop ' golden

perch', wurley ' Aboriginal hut'; there is a detailed account of South

Australian borrowings in Knight 1988), or from Tasmania (lubra

'Aboriginal woman', boobialla 'large shrub, a species of Myoporum') or

Western Australia (Jarrah 'Western Australian eucalypt', kylie 'boom￾erang'). Though the listed words are fairly generally known, they are

not universally known to Australians and there is some regional

variation in such knowledge (Ramson 1964). Except for one or two

striking items like boomerang and kangaroo, which have become inter￾national, the words have little semantic complexity.

It will be noticed that the first contact, with coastal New South Wales,

was the chief source of borrowing and the source of the best-known

words (other than kangaroo), though some of them (e.g. koala, dingo) did

not fully displace English descriptions {native bear, native dog) until a

period of growing nationalism a century after their first appearance. It

will also be noticed that most of the words borrowed from Aboriginal

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