Australian and New Zealand English

Both Australia and New Zealand have in common a relatively recent history of European settlement and both share transplanted Englishes. Towards the end of the 18th century, the population of the British Isles was only about 15 million. A considerable number of these people spoke their own Celtic languages and little or no English. Moreover, a good many of the English speakers spoke only their regional dialects and dialect differences could be striking – we are after all talking of a time when horses and sailing vessels were the most efficient means of travel and communication. This then was roughly the state of the language when exploration southwards established the first English-speaking settlements in the Antipodes.

For Australia, the first appearance of English coincides with the arrival of Captain Cook in 1770. However, it wasn’t until later in 1788 that we can really talk about a European settlement there. Over the course of the next 20 years or so Britain established its first penal colony in Sydney in order to alleviate the problem of its overcrowded prisons. The early arrivals were therefore largely prisoners, prison officers and their families. Non-convicts, or free settlers as they were known, did not really reach significant numbers until the middle of the 19th century.

On the other side of the Tasman, English got off to a later and somewhat slower start. Cook had charted the islands around the same time he visited Australia, and although there was unofficial settlement in New Zealand as early as the late 1700s (involving small numbers of people often from Australia), the official colony was not established until 1840. After this time immigration from both Australia and Britain increased dramatically.

The different mixes of original dialects, the different dates of settlement, the different settlement patterns and the contact with the different indigenous languages have meant that varieties growing up in Australia and New Zealand are already quite distinct. The physical separation from other English-speaking regions has allowed this distinctiveness to flourish. Regional variation within Australian and New Zealand English, however, is minor compared to other varieties. The blending of the original British dialects (the so-called “melting pot” effect) has left behind remarkable regional homogeneity – even within Australia, a continent some thirty times the size of Britain. Notwithstanding stylistically and socially marked variation, there is very little in the way of clearly identifiable regional variation. There is one notable exception; namely, those speakers from the Southern part of the South Island of New Zealand. This group have a striking semi-rhotic variety of English; in other words, /r/ is (variably) pronounced in postvocalic positions, especially after the NURSE vowel.

However, lay perceptions are quite different. Speakers are often puzzled by linguists’ claims of regional homogeneity, pointing to obvious vocabulary differences they have encountered in their travels. A type of large, smooth sausage in Auckland is polony, in Christchurch saveloy and in Southland Belgium or Belgium roll/sausage. Both polony and saveloy are familiar terms for some Australians, although people in Adelaide (South Australia) are more comfortable with fritz, Brisbanites (Queensland) and Sydney-siders (New South Wales) with devon. Lexical variation of this kind will always exist of course and is certainly fascinating to speakers, but it does not make for distinct dialects. Moreover, popular claims that people can identify someone’s place of origin purely on the basis of how s/he speaks are exaggerated. With the exception of the so-called Southland “burr” just mentioned, accent and dialect differences are more likely to be a matter of statistical tendency, with certain differences occurring more or less frequently in one place than another. Some of these differences have existed from the beginning of settlement. They evolved because of the different dialect mixes in each region. The Southland “burr”, for example, can be explained by the significant number of Scots who settled in these southern regions.

Although there is limited regional diversity now, we might expect that over time both physical and social distance will have the effect of increasing regional differences in Australia and New Zealand. Also the fact that there is no single prestige regional variety of the language in either country means that varieties will be freer to go their separate ways. In other words, speakers will not want to shift towards a distinctively Canberra or Wellington usage because it has more status. Certainly the separation of urban and rural communities looks currently to be inspiring the richest regional diversity in these places. In Australia, for example, we already find significant differences, particularly with respect to speed and also broadness of accent. For example, people in the city of Melbourne (Victoria) tend to speak faster than those in rural Victoria of the same socio-economic background. There is also a greater proportion of broad speakers in the rural regions. This is one popular stereotype that does appear to have some basis in reality. Rural speakers of vernacular varieties are not only showing distinctness of accent and vocabulary, there are also signs of significant grammatical differences emerging. But social factors are crucial here as well. It is difficult to talk about regionally defined variation without appealing to social aspects of the area. Non-standard vernacular varieties are also typical of the lower socio-economic classes in a speech community – basically, the higher up the social scale you go, the closer the speakers tend to be to the standard language and therefore the less remarkable the regional differences are. Moreover these grammatical features are by no means confined to the vernacular Englishes of Australia and New Zealand. Features such as irregular verb forms, special pronouns for plural “you”, and never as a general negator crop up in non-standard varieties all over the English-speaking world.

Effects of globalization are also contributing to this increasing diversity by fostering new socially-defined ethnic variation in these countries. Massive flows of people, including tourists, refugees and migrants, have produced an intermixing of people and cultures which is unprecedented. Clearly culture and language at the local level have been changed irrevocably by this “inter-national” movement of people. And as each individual group seeks to assert its own identity, different ethnic varieties of English can become an important means of signalling the group boundaries. Italian or Greek features in a group’s English, for example, can be potent markers of that group’s ethnicity. To give some idea of the potential for diversity here, consider that over the last 30 years or so, speakers from well over 40 different ethnic groups have migrated to Australia. These different ethnic mixes are now adding a vibrant new socially relevant aspect to Australian English. In cities such as Melbourne and Sydney, for example, the Italian and Greek communities are of particular interest because of their size and also because they have been in these places long enough now to have teenagers who were born in the country.

Ethnicity is clearly a crucial part of social identity and is something that people want to demonstrate through their use of language. Even though New Zealand English and Australian English have incorporated very little from Maori or Aboriginal languages respectively, varieties of Maori English and Aboriginal English are providing an interesting new dimension to the “Extraterritorial Englishes” in the Antipodes. In the face of the disappearance of local indigenous languages in these two countries, such distinct Englishes have become an important means of signalling these speakers’ cultural and social identity. Of the 200–250 Aboriginal languages that existed in Australia at the time of earliest European contact, only around 90 have survived and of these as few as 20 can be described as robust; e.g. Warlpiri, Arrente and Western Desert, each with about 3,000 speakers. In New Zealand, by the 1980s the number of Maori speakers was already as low as 12% of the total Maori population. Few contexts remain where Maori is the natural means of communication (cf. Benton 1991). In both Australia and New Zealand vigorous efforts are now being made to maintain, even revive, these languages, and time will tell how successful they are in reversing the overall trend toward language death.

Another consequence of the rise of the global village is that native Englishes such as New Zealand English and Australian English are now much more open than ever before to global influence. There is of course a pervasive American dimension to much of what is global – a clear distinction between globalization and American cultural imperialism is at times difficult to maintain. It would be surprising therefore, given the global presence of the United States and the inevitable loosening of ties between Britain and its former Antipodean colonies, if there were not some sort of linguistic steamrolling going on. Certainly, the “Americanization” of Australian and New Zealand English is currently a hot topic within these speech communities – and reactions are generally hostile. Newspaper headlines like “Facing an American Invasion” go on to “condemn this insidious, but apparently virile, infection from the USA”. In letters to the editor and talkback calls on the radio, speakers rail against “ugly Americanisms” (many of which, it turns out, are not Americanisms at all; cf. the discussion in Burridge and Mulder 1998: ch. 12). Lay concerns about language usage are not based on genuine linguistic matters, but reflect deeper and more general social judgements. In this case, the current hostility towards American usage is undoubtedly born of the linguistic insecurity that comes from the dominance of America as a cultural, political, military and economic superpower.

In fact, the actual impact of American English on Antipodean Englishes is difficult to determine. Most of the complaints centre around vocabulary. Lexical influences are the most obvious to speakers and intensify the wide-spread perception of American influence. This is undoubtedly fuelled by the high visibility of spelling – although Australian and New Zealand spelling conventions derive traditionally from the British, the technological presence of America means this is an area of rapidly growing American influence. Certainly there are areas, such as fast food industry and technology, where American influence on the lexicon is evident. There is also a strong American aspect to teenage slang. Elsewhere, however, influence remains slight. Phonological and grammatical transfers are also not much in evidence. Apparent American imports in the area of phonology include features of stress (such as primarily in place of primarily), affrication of /tr/ and /str/ (where tree sounds much like “chree”) and flapping or tapping of inter-vocalic /t/ (where latter and ladder become similar in pronunciation). Since examples like these illustrate natural phonological changes, however, it is difficult to establish the exact role of American influence here. Contact with American English could simply be accelerating trends already underway. Apparent grammatical imports such as an increase in the use of the subjunctive could also represent independently motivated change rather than direct borrowing. And while the resurgence of conservative features like gotten may well be due to American English influence too, it is also possible that these come from the vestiges of dialectal users downunder.

As a final note, we use linguistic labels such as Australian English or New Zealand English, as if each were a single immutable language variety. Clearly, this is not the reality. The reality is that speakers from different regions, from different social classes, of different ages, of different occupations, of different gender identification, of different sexual orientation will all talk differently. People talk differently in different contexts too – an informal chat, an interview, a lecture and so on. It must always be remembered that labels like Australian English or New Zealand English are convenient cover terms for what are really clumps or clusters of mutually intelligible speech varieties.