Australian English

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Australian English

• By Victoria Kosareva

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• There are different territorial variants of
  English.
• It is a regional variety possessing a literary
  norm.

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

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• 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.

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• 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.

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

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dingo
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kangaroo
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boomerang
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• 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.

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• 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.

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• 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.

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• 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").

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• 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' ).

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

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• 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.

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• 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.

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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 /d?/, /?/ and /t?/, producing standard
  pronunciations such as /t???n/ for tune.

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• The flapping of intervocalic /t/ and /d/ to
  alveolar tap ? 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.

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• Both intervocalic /nt/ and /n/ may be realized as
  n or ?, 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.

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