“THE ANTIPODES”
I. English in Australia and New Zealand: Information collected in Schneider 2011 (Text 16)
When did EN spread to these territories?
18th and 19th centuries: important dates - 1788 (AUS) and 1840 (NZ).
Who were the settlers?
Speakers coming from SE England, Ireland (with no major linguistic consequences) and Scotland.
When did these varieties become independent?
Accents noted as different from the middle of the 19th century in AUS and the end of that century
in NZ.
Social origin of the colonists?
In AUS, mainly convicts and farmers, so they came from low social classes (because of this, affinities
with Cockney); greater diversity in NZ.
What characterises these varieties?
• influences from different regional dialects brought from the British Isles
• regional variation only recently identified, but strong social variation recognised for long
• local influences (mainly Maori in NZ)
• presence of ethnic varieties in both countries - Aboriginal English and Maori English;
• structural specificities (see text)
*lexis / vocabulary:
o influences of local languages – place names (1/3 in AUS, 2/3 in NZ); names of local fauna,
flora and artefacts;
o new meanings for pre-existing words: NZ dairy (=cornershop)
o new compounds: AUS outback (“isolated rural country”)
o productivity of -o and -y / -ie (AUS smoko - “a stop for a rest and a smoke”; AUS bikie -
“biker”)
*grammar: some uses of the perfect
*pronunciation: above all (cf. Schneider and notes below)
Sociolinguistic recognition:
• Good acceptance only recent: exonormative attitude until the last decades of the 20th century (see
testimony of Anthony Pym on youtube - https: //www.youtube.com/watch? V = 7Rl4rEaAZLM & list
= PL64603044F51F3130 & index = 13);
• Recently published local dictionaries, concomitant to the development of nationalist sentiment. In
NZ this is accompanied by greater recognition of the Maori minority, whose language is now co-
official with English (see Jacinta’s Arden speech at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D20Agteh7U0 -
17/10/2020).
II. Australian English (information collected in Melchers and Shaw (2011), Text 16)
(...)
RP Broad / General AusEN Example
[i:] [eɪ] FLEECE
[eɪ] [aɪ] FACE
[aɪ] [ɒɪ] PRICE
[u:] [əʊ] GOOSE
[əʊ] [ʌʊ] GOAT
[aʊ] [ɛə] MOUTH
• Vocabulary. See above and more examples in
o https://nomadsworld.com/aussie-slang/
o https://www.macquariedictionary.com.au (e.g. Aussie slang and animals)
• Varieties:
• Regional variation only recently under analysis (on lexical variation see Maps of Australian
language – swimmers v cozzies, scallops v potato cakes | Australia news | The Guardian;
• Strong social speech differences, identified long ago. Despite a deeply egalitarian culture and a
taste for informality, three social varieties were identified in Australia, characterised mainly by
their accent: Cultivated, General and Broad Australian English. The latter is very informal and
more typically masculine. However, in the latter decade typical features are becoming more
common, characterising also AusEN in formal contexts.
• On all levels of variation check research being conducted in “Australian voices” at Macquarie
University - Australian voices (mq.edu.au);
*****
III. Australian English – Examples
Example 1. Former PM Scott Morrison (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t2A_WsCVZ-4&t=74s –
25/09/2020)
Example 2. PM Anthony Albanese (Bula, g'day and welcome to Australia Sitiveni Rabuka, Prime Minister of
Fiji 🇦🇺🇫🇯 - YouTube)
Example 3. Schneider (cf. CTA and Moodle); oscillates between Broad and General.
Example 3. Australia 4, in IDEA (International Dialects of English Archive)
http://www.dialectsarchive.com/australia-4
THE RAINBOW PASSAGE
(The earliest recordings in the archive (before we adopted Comma Gets A Cure) feature a reading of some
or all of the following elicitation passage. This allows the researcher to compare the sounds of different
dialects applied to a standard text.)
When the sunlight strikes raindrops in the air, they act as a prism and form a rainbow. The rainbow is a
division of white light into many beautiful colors. These take the shape of a long round arch, with its path
high above, and its two ends apparently beyond the horizon. There is, according to legend, a boiling pot of
gold at one end. People look, but no one ever finds it. When a man looks for something beyond his reach,
his friends say he is looking for the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.
Throughout the centuries people have explained the rainbow in various ways. Some have accepted
it as a miracle without physical explanation. To the Hebrews it was a token that there would be no more
universal floods. The Greeks used to imagine that it was a sign from the gods to foretell war or heavy rain.
The Norsemen considered the rainbow as a bridge over which the gods passed from earth to their home in
the sky. Others have tried to explain the phenomenon physically. Aristotle thought that the rainbow was
caused by reflection of the sun’s rays by the rain. Since then physicists have found that it is not reflection,
but refraction by the raindrops which causes the rainbows. Many complicated ideas about the rainbow
have been formed. The difference in the rainbow depends considerably upon the size of the drops, and the
width of the colored band increases as the size of the drops increases. The actual primary rainbow
observed is said to be the effect of super-imposition of a number of bows. If the red of the second bow
falls upon the green of the first, the result is to give a bow with an abnormally wide yellow band, since red
and green light when mixed form yellow. This is a very common type of bow, one showing mainly red and
yellow, with little or no green or blue.
Further reference
ON the history of Australia, watch Australia in colour, available on youtube and translated on RTP play
Episódios - Austrália a Cores - Documentários - RTP
