Australian English
Development and Peculiarities
The history of Australian
English starts with kangaroo (1770) and Captain James Cook's glossary of local
words used in negotiations with the Endeavour River tribes. The language was
pidgin.
Aboriginal
Vocabulary
The aboriginal vocabulary,
which is one of the trademarks of Australian English, included billabong (a
waterhole), jumbuck (a sheep), corroboree (an assembly), boomerang (a curved
throwing stick), and budgerigar (from budgeree, "good" and gar,
"parrot").
The number of Aboriginal words
in Australian English is quite small and is confined to the namings of plants
(like bindieye and calombo), trees (like boree, banksia, quandong and mallee),
birds (like currawong, galah and kookaburra), animals (like wallaby and wombat)
and fish (like barramindi). As in North America , when it comes to place-names
the Aboriginal influence was much greater: with a vast continent to name, about
a third of all Australian place-names are Aboriginal.
The Aborigines also adopted
words from maritime pidgin English, words like piccaninny and bilong (belong).
They used familiar pidgin English variants like talcum and catchum. The most
famous example is gammon, an eighteenth-century Cockney word meaning "a
lie".
Non-aboriginal
Vocabulary
In the late eighteenth and
early nineteenth centuries, the Australian population were either convicts,
ex-convicts or of convict descent. The convict argot was called "flash"
language, and James Hardy Vaux published a collection of it in 1812, the New and
Comprehensive Vocabulary of the Flash Language. Most of the words and phrases
Vaux listed remained confined to convict circles and have not passed in the main
stream of Australian English. There are a few exceptions, of which the best
known is swag meaning "a bundle of personal belongings" in standard Australian.
Swagman, billy, jumbuck, tucker-bag and coolibah tree are early
Australianisms.
The roots of Australian English
lie in the South and East of England, London, Scotland and Ireland. To take just
a few examples, words like corker, dust-up, purler and tootsy all came to
Australia from Ireland; billy comes from the Scottish bally, meaning "a milk
pail". A typical Australianism like fossick, meaning "to search
unsystematically", is a Cornish word. Cobber came from the Suffolk verb to cob,
"to take a liking to someone". Tucker is widely used for "food". Clobber has
Romany roots and is originally recorded in Kent as clubbered up, meaning
"dressed up".
Australian
Peculiarities
In 1945 Sidney J. Baker
published the book The Australian Language which was a milestone in the
emergence of a separate Australian Standard. Since 1945 the Australian
vernacular continues to flourish.
Australian English incorporates
several uniquely Australian terms, such as outback to refer to remote regional
areas, walkabout to refer to a long journey of uncertain length and bush to
refer to native forested areas, but also to regional areas as well. Fair dinkum
can mean "are you telling me the truth?", "this is the truth!", or "this is
ridiculous!" depending on context - the disputed origin dates back to the gold
rush in the 1850s, "dinkum" being derived from the Chinese word for "gold" or
"real gold": fair dinkum is the genuine article. G'day is well known as a
stereotypical Australian greeting - it is worth noting that G'day is not
synonymous with the expression "Good Day", and is never used as an expression
for "farewell". Many of these terms have been adopted into British English via
popular culture and family links.
Some elements of Aboriginal
languages, as has already been mentioned, have been incorporated into Australian
English, mainly as names for the indigenous flora and fauna (e.g. dingo,
kangaroo), as well as extensive borrowings for place names. Beyond that, very
few terms have been adopted into the wider language. A notable exception is
Cooee (a musical call which travels long distances in the bush and is used to
say "is there anyone there?"). Although often thought of as an Aboriginal word,
didgeridoo/didjeridu (a well known wooden musical instrument) is actually an
onomatopoeic term coined by an English settler.
Australian English has a unique
set of diminutives formed by adding -o or -ie (-y) to the ends of (often
abbreviated) words. There does not appear to be any particular pattern to which
of these suffixes is used.
Examples with the -o ending
include
Examples of the -ie (-y) ending include