English language is now the national language of the United Kingdom, the United States, Australia, New Zealand and most parts of Canada. Each country has its own national version of the language standard. Here it would be appropriate to speak about the notion of language variety that denotes the phenomena of using the language with the applied features of national peculiarities and identity.
Australian variant of English has always been and remains a cause of disputes. Developing in terms of geographic and cultural isolation, under the influence of extralinguistic factors – characteristics of the natural environment and way of life, the influence of contact languages – English Language in Australia has acquired a number of features that allow determining its status as Australia’s national variant of English. Australian English language does not occupy a subordinate position in relation to the Standard English, as it can be in the case of some geographical dialects; it is not limited to the sphere of everyday talking. It is used in government agencies, educational institutions, it is the language of mass communication and literature.
Nowadays the process of literary version of the regulation of Australian English and pronunciation norms are not completed due to the relatively short period of development in relative isolation of Australia. The study of the Australian variant of English helps to identify the trends in the development of the language on the continent (Jupp, 2004).
The development of the Australian variant of the English language has a comparatively short history – two centuries.
It should be noted that between the initial point of the process (one language) and its final point (two different, albeit related language) there is a long historical path. In the first stage the language of the separated group of people is nearly identical language to the original language (social structure of the separated group should be taken into account).
In the second phase – the language of the separate group is different from the original one and is a dialect of some territory and is used in everyday communication, while literary standard is the basic language. When the language of the separated group of people starts to be used in the field of literary writing, speech, and it develops its own literary rule, its social and regional variety, its common parlance and the slang, its status can already be defined as a literary version of the basic language.
Finally, as a national version of the language, the language of the separated parts of the population serves as the language for all spheres of life and gradually becomes an independent language with its literary norm, common parlance, a complex hierarchy of social and territorial forms of speech. The process of divergent development of the languages ends and it is possible to speak about two languages.
Australian version has its origin from the lower strata of English society of the XVIII-th century, as well as it has the specific characteristics of the language of seamen and soldiers, and the closest to the south-western dialect of the British version of English with a heavy admixture of Irish. Australian English was influenced by Australian Aboriginal languages, affecting mainly the names of animals and plants, as well as geographical names. All this led to the fact that English language of modern Australia is different from British English.
The main observations concerning the origin of Australian pronunciation were made by Australian linguist Delbridge (The cultivated Australian, 1985), who has done considerable research in the field of Australian pronunciation. He postulates the following:
- the Australian version of English in origin is the so-called “urban” language, since the first settlers, native speakers were mainly from the cities;
- it is the language of the working class, the language of uneducated and poor people;
- the Australian version of the English language includes features of the language of many parts of England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland.
The author concludes that all these forms of language have been brought to Australia and the Australian version is a generalization and leveling of all language features of the brought dialects (The cultivated Australian, 1985).
Comparing the Australian and British versions of English, researcher has unanimously pointed out that the greatest differences occur in the uncodified casual everyday communication and in the area of phonetic structure and vocabulary of the two versions of the English language. Speaking about the grammatical differences it should be noted that they are slight.
The Australian version of English is the relatively homogeneous. Many researchers believe that in Australia there are no local dialects. In the Australian version of the English language there are three variations of pronunciation: general, Cultivated and Broad. These variations of pronunciation do not have the certain geographical localization, they are not allocated to cultural restrictions between layers of the population, and these variations in pronunciation can be seen in the same city or even the same family.
The most wide-spread of the Australian variations is general variant; more than half of the population speaks it, including members of parliament, teachers and schools and other educational institutions. Three types of Australian pronunciation are used due to functional and stylistic reasons, and at least 30% of native speakers can use all three types, depending on the situation of communication, they can change the type of pronunciation (Smitz, 2007).
Despite the differences between the three variations of the Australian language, they form an integrated system which is different from the British pronunciation standard. The starkest contrasted is Broad, the closest to it is cultivated. On this basis, and considering the peculiarities of the development of English in Australia, some researchers have put forward the hypothesis that the primary form for the Australian pronunciation is exactly colloquial language – the result of merging and the evolution of common parlance, dialect and jargon used by the first white settlers of Australia. Broad and cultivated in particular emerged as the “exclusive” versions by smoothing characteristics of common parlance and rapprochement to the RP(Jupp, 2004).
The comparison of both variants of English at the level of lexical-semantic phenomena shows that the majority of the Australian vocabulary coincides with the vocabulary of British version.
In comparing the lexical-semantic system of the Australian version of English and the British it is possible to define the following cases:
- The words are the same in both versions.
- The words are in both versions, but they are different:
- Semantically
- Emotionally and expressive marking
- Functionally and stylistically
- In the frequency
- The words are stored in the British version, but disappeared from the Australian:
- Completely
- Replaced
- The words are stored in the Australian version, but went out of use in the UK:
- Completely
- Replaced
- The words appeared in the British version, but they are absent in the Australian version
- The words appeared in the Australian version:
- with the help of word-forming on the basis of word-elements and patterns of English language or on the basis of mixed origin elements;
- Borrowings:
- from the languages of Australian Aboriginals;
- from the other European languages;
- from other variants of English.
- Have been created artificially.
In conclusion it should be said that the Basic English language has undergone significant changes as a result of the formation of new ethnic groups in the process of colonial expansion of Great Britain. The most significant impact on the formation of national versions of English have had the factors of ethnogenesis: ethno-cultural structure of the population, interpenetration of cultures and languages, the natural environment.
It is very important for every non native speaker to understand the difference between the variants of English. Of course it is impossible to learn the peculiarities of these differences being out of the country – only general features of the differences can be studied then. To my mind, it is better to pay more attention to RP because it can be understood in every country where English is spoken. The peculiarities of the variants of English should be studied if the learners are being prepared for living or working in the country where a certain variant of English is spoken.
Works cited
Jupp James. The English in Australia. Cambridge University Press. 2004.
Romaine Suzanne. Language in Australia. Cambridge University Press. 2004.
Smitz Paul , Blake Barry. Australian Language & Culture. Lonely Planet; 3 Blg edition. 2007.
The cultivated Australian: Festschrift in honour of Arthur Delbridge (Beitrage zur Phonetik und Linguistik) H. Buske. 1985.