Summary Of The Changes In Australian English From The First Fleet To Present Day

Tracing the changes in Australian English from the First Fleet to present day is really about exploring the story of the nation, author Kel Richards says. The English language arrived in Australia a little more than 200 years ago and since that time it has been levelled, shaped and restyled to give Australians a specific dialect.

"When you trace the story of Australian English from 1788 to the present day, you find yourself actually tracing the story of the whole nation," Richards told 702 ABC Sydney's Dominic Knight. Beyond the influences and movements that shaped our use and understanding of English, Richards said we first needed to think about our belief of language.

"They now say there is no such thing as English, the English language doesn't exist, there are only Englishes, only dialects. "We have our dialects and as it happens, quite by chance, it is the best, most colourful, most fresh English dialect on the planet." Richards has studied and explained the language's history and documented it in his new book, The Story of Australian English.

According to Richards, the beginning of our Australian accent appeared following the arrival of European settlers in 1788.

"It appeared from a process called levelling down because you had all these people who came here on 11 ships from different dialect areas, regional dialect areas across England," he said. "They all spoke differently and they used different words and what they had to do, in order to communicate with each other, was to level their dialect difference down."

Around 50 years after the colony was established, Richards said English people arriving in Australia started to claim that Australians were speaking the "purest English on

earth".
This discovery period of other ways of speaking and other words for things brought an acute awareness of the language and sound. "What our accent really is, is English with the dialect variations taken out.” We now think of it as being our dialect, and it is, but that's what was happening in those early [days], it happened really fast."
About 100 years on from the First Fleet, Richards said the arrival of the public-speaking movement in the 1880s and 1890s "trap" our language and changed it for good. "It started off on how to annunciate and speak clearly but what they did was pick one dialect, standard southern English, and they said 'that is correct'. "Standard southern English came to be what is called RP, Received Pronunciation, Oxbridge, that kind of accent.
"That was right, everything else was wrong." According to Richards, before this time general, middle Australian accents were most important before refined and broad Australian accents arrived later, as a reaction to the public-speaking movement. The evidence for this is that in the late 1950s, researchers went out and tape recorded some elderly people in their 80s and 90s who had been born in the far west of New South Wales and some of them in Tasmania," he explained. "They all had general, middle Australian accents because when they were born in the 1880s and 1890s. There was no broad Australian, there was no cultivated Australian, it hadn't happened yet.
In terms of Flash language as spoken by the convicts, a man by the name of James Hardy Vaux who authored an autobiography at the time, documented much of the slang found littered in our language today. "A word like swag, swag was a bundle of stolen goods," he said. "Then it becomes any bundle of goods and then the person who carries it becomes a swagman and suddenly you're in the middle of Waltzing Matilda, that's the way it works. "The story of our language, from 1788 to the present day, is actually the story of the nation.
References- www.abc news.com
Author. Kel Richards
Title. The story behind 'Australian English': why we talk the way we do.