Transcript Document

Australian English
By Victoria Kosareva
• There are different territorial
variants of English.
• It is a regional variety
possessing a literary norm.
• Every variant of English has
its own literature and is
characterized by
peculiarities in phonetics,
spelling, grammar and
vocabulary.
• 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.
• 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.
• The local words for new
notions penetrate into the
English language and later
on may become
international.
For example:
dingo
kangaroo
boomerang
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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").
• 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' ).
• Australian English has a
unique set of
diminutives(уменьшительное
слово) formed by adding –o or
–ie to the ends of words, e.g.
arvo(afternoon), servo(service
station), barbie(barbecue),
bikkie(biscuit)
• 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.
• 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.
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 /dʒ/, /ʃ/ and /tʃ/,
producing standard pronunciations
such as /tʃʉːn/ for tune.
• The flapping of intervocalic /t/ and
/d/ to alveolar tap [ɾ] 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.
• Both intervocalic /nt/ and /n/ may be
realized as [n] or [ɾ],̃ 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.