MINISTRY OF EDUCATION AND SCIENCE OF UKRAINE
UNIVERSITY
PECULIARITIES OF THE USE OF AUSTRALIAN ENGLISH
Done by
I year student
2016
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION…………………………………………………………………….2
LINGUISTIC PECULIARITIES OF OF AUSTRALIAN ENGLISH
History………………………………………………………………………………………3
Pronunciation……………………………………………………………………………...4
Vocabulary…………………………………………………………………………………5
Grammar………………………………………..………………………………………..10
Conclusion………………………………………………………………………….11
References………………………………………………………………………….12
INTRODUCTION
The Australian English language (AusE, Aue, AusEng, en-AU) is a relatively new version of English and it is just over 200 years old. Australian English can be described as a new dialect that has developed as a result of contact between people who spoke different, mutually intelligible, varieties of English.
Despite being given no official status in the Constitution, English is Australia’s de facto national language and is the first language of, and is used exclusively by, a large majority of the population. Australian English differs from other varieties of English in vocabulary, accent, pronunciation, register, grammar and spelling.
The aim of the report is to elicit linguistic peculiarities of Australian English analyzing commonly used vocabulary by contemporary Australians in everyday life such as colloquial words and expressions, exclamations, slangisms and realems.
The issue of linguistic peculiarities of AusE is studied by such notable linguists as J. Bernard, J. Dixon, J. Harrington, P. Kerswill, G. Leitner, A. Mitchell, P. Trudgill, C. Yallop and others [1; 7; 8; 9]. The authors state that Australian English began in the early colony as koine, that is, a new dialect that developed as a result of contact between speakers of different but mutually intelligible forms of language. Koineisation is often complete by the second generation in the form of a unique dialect specific to a settlement and there are evidences from primary written sources that AusE was indeed firmly established by the second native-born generation of white settlers. J. Bernard refers to this dialect as ‘proto-broad’ which developed and diverged between the 1850s and 1880s, as a result of large scale immigration from Britain, into a continuum containing three identifiable accent types: Broad, General and Cultivated (the ‘Broadness Continuum’) [1]. Although evolutionary changes have occurred, these varieties can still be found in Australia and all three display properties which make them uniquely Australian.
According to the 2011 census, Australia has over 432 languages including 216 Australian Indigenous languages, and 216 languages which cover the rest of the world. This is an increase of 73 languages since 2005 [2].
HISTORY
Australian English was distinctly recognizable as different from British English shortly after the founding of the colony of New South Wales in 1788. It arose from the intermingling of children of early settlers from a great variety of mutually intelligible dialectal regions of the British Isles and quickly developed into a major variety of English. This very first peer group would have spoken in similar ways to each other to help bind the peer group and express their group membership. This very first generation of children created a new dialect that was to become the language of the nation [3].
Records from the early 19th century show the distinct dialect that had surfaced in the colonies since first settlement in 1788[7], with Peter Miller Cunningham's 1827 book Two Years in New South Wales, describing the distinctive accent and vocabulary of the native-born colonists, different from that of their parents and with a strong London influence. Anthony Burgess writes that "Australian English may be thought of as a kind of fossilised Cockney of the Dickensian era" [10].
The first of the Australian gold rushes, in the 1850s, began a large wave of immigration, during which about two per cent of the population of the United Kin...
