Australian English

By Victoria Kosareva

• There are different territorial variants of English.

• It is a regional variety possessing a literary norm.

• Every variant of English has its own literature and is characterized by peculiarities in phonetics, spelling, grammar and vocabulary.

• The vocabulary of all the variants is characterized by a high percentage of borrowings from the language of the people who inhabited the land before the English colonisers came.

• Many of them denote some specific realia of the new country: local animals, plants or weather conditions, new social relations, new trades and conditions of labour.

• The local words for new notions penetrate into the English language and later on may become international.

For example:

dingo

kangaroo

boomerang

• Australian English is similar in many respects to British English but it also borrows from American English, e.g. it uses truck instead of lorry. There are also influences from Hiberno-English, as many Australians are of Irish descent.

• The origins of other words are not as clear or are disputed. Dinkum (or "fair dinkum") can mean "true", "is that true?" or "this is the truth!”. It is often claimed that dinkum dates back to the Australian goldrushes of the 1850s, and that it is derived from the Cantonese (or Hokkien) ding kam, meaning, "top gold". But scholars give greater credence to the conjecture that it originated from the extinct East Midlands dialect in England, where dinkum (or dincum) meant "hard work" or "fair work", which was also the original meaning in Australian English.

• Similarly, g'day, a stereotypical Australian greeting, is no longer synonymous with "good day" in other varieties of English and is never used as an expression for "farewell", as "good day" is in other countries. It is simply used as a greeting.

• A few words of Australian origin are now used in other parts of the Anglosphere as well; among these are first past the post, to finalise, brownout, and the colloquialisms uni "university" and short of a meaning stupid or crazy, (e.g. "a sandwich short of a picnic").

• Australian English incorporates several uniquely Australian terms, such as, for example, outback to refer to remote, sparsely populated area, walkabout to refer to a long journey of certain length and bush to refer to native forested areas, but also to regional areas('Bush' is a word of Dutch origin: 'Bosch' ).

• Australian English has a unique set of diminutives(уменьшительное слово) formed by adding –o or –ie to the ends of words, e.g. arvo(afternoon), servo(service station), barbie(barbecue), bikkie(biscuit)

• Occasionally, a –za diminutive is used, usually for personal names where the first of multiple syllables ends in an “r”, e.g. Sharon becomes Shazza.

• A very common feature of traditional Australian English is rhyming slang, based on Cockney rhyming slang and imported by migrants from London in the 19th century. For example, Capitain Cook rhymes with look, so to have a capitain cook means to have a look.

Australian phonetics.

• Australian English is a non-rhotic accent and it is similar to the other Southern Hemisphere accents (New Zealand English and South African English).

• Many speakers have also coalesced /dj/, /sj/ and /tj/ into /dʒ/, /ʃ/ and /tʃ/, producing standard pronunciations such as /tʃʉːn/ for tune.

• The flapping of intervocalic /t/ and /d/ to alveolar tap [ɾ] before unstressed vowels (as in butter, party) and syllabic /l/ (bottle), as well as at the end of a word or morpheme before any vowel (what else, whatever). Thus, for most speakers, pairs such as ladder/latter, metal/medal, and coating/coding are pronounced identically.

• Both intervocalic /nt/ and /n/ may be realized as [n] or [ɾH ], which can make winter and winner homophones. Interesting will sound like inner-resting. Most areas in which /nt/ is reduced to /n/, it is accompanied further by nasalization of simple post-vocalic /n/, so that /nt/ and /n/ remain phonemically distinct. In such cases, the preceding vowel becomes nasalized, and is followed in cases where the former /nt/ was present, by a distinct /n/. This stop-absorption by the preceding nasal /n/ does not occur when the second syllable is stressed, as in entails.