The Cambridge History of the English Language Volume 5 Part 6 pptx

English in Australia account to refine the description of sociolinguistic variation (Shopen 1978; Martino 1982; Horvath 1985). Even regional variation may prove to be more prevalent than previously supposed when finer methods are used (e.g. in Jernudd 1973) and social variation taken into account. Work on Melbourne English is currently being advanced by D. and M. Bradley (see Bradley 1979, 1989; Bradley & Bradley 1979). It is an important question how far the acrolect, Cultivated Australian English, is passively understood by most Australians. To make it so is an aim of education, and the results of public examinations may be regarded as expensive large-scale research projects to quantify the success of this aim. In its written form the acrolect approximates to standard written English, opening an immense world of experience to those who master it. But such understanding, even of the spoken forms, varies in thoroughness and cannot be taken for granted. Australian soldiers in 1915 are said to have found the ' high-falutin' speech of their British officers ' hard to understand' and ' got into a lot of strife' (that is 'trouble') for laughing at their commands (Facey 1981: 249). Broadcasting has probably brought increased passive familiarity with variation in accent, though in general Australians are not much consciously aware of such differences. Few make the efforts many English do to change from one type of accent to another. Donald Home (1975: 201) was an exception but there is an ironical intention in his account of his feeling that 'it seemed a negation of education to speak " like an Australian "' and in the description of his private practising of diphthongs until from the security of an achieved acrolect he could defend the view 'that there was nothing wrong with the Australian accent; it was just that some of us did not happen to use it'. 6.3 Morphology and syntax 6.3.1 General Morphology and syntax have been comparatively neglected in Aus- tralian English studies. Comments tend to be sporadic: for example, Australian -ie/-j and -o terminations (e.g. Johnny/Johnno) are discussed by Ridge (1984: 336-8), and there is a small Australian input into Matsuda's (1982) study of variation between out and out of in such contexts as'looked out {of) the window', but in general there appears to be much the same range of formal and informal choices as in southern England. Variations are easier to record than phonological variants but the likelihood that 301 George W. Turner literary preconceptions will colour the observations of literary in- formants is greater. Did Mrs Clacy really hear a waterman say in 1852 ' times isn't as they used to was' (1963:15) or a man on the goldfields cry out' 'Ere's happles, happles, Vandemonian happles, and them as dislikes the hiland needn't heat them' {ibid.: 86) ? Catherine Helen Spence (1971: 63-4) is more plausible describing a woman in Adelaide about 1854 whose 'accent and manners were unmistakeably vulgar' (and whose daughter was accordingly denied access to a good Adelaide school) saying 'she cries dreadful' or 'in the bush people gets so rough'. Such literary evidence could be multiplied. It is evidence of the variety of grammatical forms brought to the mixing bowl in the new country and presumably surviving to an extent that is only beginning to be measured. Research using computers and quantitative methods is beginning to address this question. A survey of speech in Queensland was already made over a quarter of a century ago (Flint 1964; Turner 1966: 123-7). More recently Corbett & Ahmad (1986) describe a corpus of texts from The Age (Melbourne) amounting to 100,000 words, being editorials from September 1980 to January 1981 and available from ICAME, the International Computer Archive for Modern English in Bergen, Norway. In Sydney, David Blair and Peter Collins are compiling a data base designed to be comparable with a corpus of a million running words made at Brown University in the United States, and a matching corpus, built on the same mix of varieties, at the University of Lancaster in England. The mix of varieties can be matched except that there is a time lag of some quarter of a century between the Brown corpus and its Sydney counterpart. 6.3.2 Morphology As already noticed, there is a problem of demarcation between morphology and phonology in accounting for forms like /grouan/ for grown but not groan, or spanner ' a wrench' and, with lengthened vowel, 'something that spans'. There may be variation between past-tense and past-participle forms with the use of a standard past-participle form as a finite verb / seen him, or conversely He mighfve took them. These and other variants in inner Sydney speech were studied statistically by Edina Eisikovits (1987). 302 English in Australia 6.3.3 Syntax Like morphological deviants, unusual syntactic patterns are normally noticed (though many people are unaware of the difficulty of parsing the frequently heard If I'd've known; which is not the Dutch and German English If I would have known since, asked to expand, speakers are apt to fumble with If I had have ). The Melbourne survey (Corbett & Ahmad 1986) brought to light an interesting variation between British and Australian use of the optional concord between nouns of multitude like committee and their verbs {the committee has/have decided). Plural agreement in such instances was found to be markedly less common in Australian than in British English. Is there a social insight here? Do we tolerate varying views less and like our political bodies to be monolithic ? A much-noticed syntactic feature of Australian English is sentence- terminal but as in ' Funny old bag. I quite like her but' (Jolley 1983:102). Trudgill (1984: 26) found that this construction is not even understood in southern England, though it is known in many dialects in Scotland, Northern Ireland and the north-east of England. 6.4 Lexis: history 6.4.1 The Aboriginal languages If the history of language in Australia, currently thought in the more conservative estimates to span about 40,000 years, is reduced in imagination to a period of twenty-four hours, the share of English, on the same scale, is about seven minutes. Yet in that short time the language of the pink strangers has replaced most of the original languages, usually without even recording them. The first English settlers in Australia neglected to name the human part of the landscape. Cook refers to the original inhabitants as 'Natives', Tench as 'natives' or 'Indians'. As the Australian-born descendants of European settlers later appropriated the name natives for themselves and in 1871 formed an Australian Natives' Association with a tendency to a ' white Australia' policy and advocacy (too late to save the Aboriginal people) of restricted immigration, no term was left. The general English term aboriginal or aborigine was commandeered, often until recently without even a capital letter. Now the Australian government's Style Manual recommends the forms Aboriginal (singular George W. Turner noun), Aboriginals (plural noun) and Aboriginal (adjective). Aborigines is given as an alternative plural, but the singular use of Aborigine is not recommended (though in fact it is not uncommon). The Aboriginal people themselves seem not to favour the name Aboriginals, which now takes on a suggestion of government, and in practice seem to use the whole phrase Aboriginal people however often it occurs in discourse. It is not ideal since seven-syllabled terms in common use tend to be slurred or abbreviated. Some Aboriginal people prefer the term Koori (adjective and noun) for an Aboriginal but it is especially an east-coast word. In south-west Australia, for example, the equivalent word would be Nyungar. The termgubba for 'white man' is colloquial and derogatory so that Koori andgubba cannot pretend to unite the races in the way that the phrase Maori and Pakeha attempts to do for New Zealand. Perhaps the best we can do at present is the crude two-colour spectrum separating the bronzed from the rubicund as blackfellow and whitefellow. There were about 200 Aboriginal languages (Dixon 1980: 1). It is not easy to count them; sometimes differences are small enough to suggest dialects rather than separate languages, but the differences are important to Aboriginal people as they indicate tribal affiliation (Dixon 1980: 33). A language might be named by a distinctive word, as if we were to label Scots as ' the language with bonny'. If the word for no is wira, the language is Wiradhuri' wira-having' (Donaldson & Donaldson 1985: 77). In the Western Desert a language distinguished by having pitjantja as the word for ' come' is distinguished by the name Pitjantjatjara (pitjant/a-hzving), and neighbouring Ngaanyatjara is distinguished by its word for 'this', ngaanya. The word for 'this' in Nyanganyatjara is nyanganya. Guugu Yimidhirr is literally 'the language havingyimi "this"' (Dixon 1980: 41-2). These names may be used in English contexts but most are not common except in the works of anthropologists and linguists. Some- times a tribal name is well enough known to have a standard form different from the modern linguists' more accurate rendition of the native word. Examples are Aranda and Kamilaroi which, if spelt in accordance with the modern spelling of these languages, would be Arirnta and Camilaraay. Like classical European languages, Aboriginal languages usually have inflections showing case, tense and mood, but there are differences, notably in the frequent presence of an ergative case marking what is in our terms the subject of a transitive verb. Some sounds which seem to be almost universal in better-known languages are missing in most 304 English in Australia Aboriginal languages, for example the sounds represented by/, s, sh or ^ in English. Thus a Western Desert word for a (nursing) sister disguises its English origin in the form tjitja (Douglas 1977: 3) where //'represents a palatal stop. No distinction is made in most Aboriginal languages between voiced and unvoiced stops (b, d,g against/), /, k), so that a given word might variously be spelt in the Roman alphabet or Anglicised with b otp, dot t,got k. The place-name Coober Pedy can be derived from the Gugada language guba bidi 'white man's holes', and Gugada itself can equally well be called Kukata (Platt 1972: 1). Similarly Pitjantjatjara or Pitjantjara may appear as Bidjandjara {ibid.). Anthropologists in the Eastern States tend to favour spelling with b, d,g while South Australians favour/), /, k (Dixon 1980: 138). Words in most Aboriginal languages have to end in a vowel. When the English word missus is borrowed as a word for 'white woman', it takes the form mitjitji (Douglas 1977: 3). The words quoted in the previous paragraph follow the rule of the terminal vowel, as do a number of words borrowed into English, kangaroo, woomera 'a "throw- ing stick" used to launch a dart or spear', brolga 'a large crane', bora 'a male initiation site', and such place-names as Wagga Wagga, Gundagai, Wodonga, Ernabella or the fictitious Bullamakanka. There were excep- tions, however, and these seem to have been especially numerous in areas where the main cities were destined to arise, the areas best known to later Australians. In New South Wales words could end in a velar nasal, so that boomerang or currawong' a crow-like bird', or billabong' a cut- off pool in a river branch', or the name Goolagong, 'sound Aboriginal'. The name of an Aboriginal protege of Governor Phillip, Bennelong, commemorated in the name Bennelong Point, now the site of the Sydney Opera House, is another example. In Victoria names like Ballarat or Mordialloc end in consonants. In south-western Australia many names end in -up, so that the name qualup bell for a shrub, based on a local name in that area, has an authentic local flavour. Another fictitious name for a remote outback locality, Woop Woop, sounds Aboriginal in its re- duplication but it is not especially associated with Western Australia and so is dubiously Aboriginal in flavour. A possible source is Whoop-up, the name of a backwoods American goldmining town in E. L. Wheeler's once popular Deadivood Dick on Deck, a form, oddly enough, which might, if unchanged, have fitted the Western Australian pattern quite well. It is a general principle that when two languages come into contact, words borrowed by one language from another ' show a superiority of George W. Turner the nation from whose language they are borrowed, though this superiority may be of many different kinds' (Jespersen 1922: 209). In accordance with this principle, just as their ancestors learned little from the despised Celts and their remoter ancestors on the continent contributed little to the superior Romans, the technologically dominant English took from the Aboriginal languages less than they gave. The earliest borrowings were from the languages first encountered in the area round Port Jackson. Examples from the Dharuk language of this area include boobook ' a type of owl', boomerang, cooee, dingo, gibber ' stone, rock', gin 'Aboriginal woman', gunya 'Aboriginal hut', hielamon, ' shield', koala, koradji' tribal doctor', kurrajong ' a tree, especially of the genus Brachychiton'', nulla-nulla 'an Aboriginal club', wallaby 'small kangaroo', wallaroo ' mountain kangaroo', waratah ' red-flowering tree', emblem of New South Wales, warrigal' (especially wild) native dog or dingo', wombat 'burrowing marsupial', wonga-wonga '(1) a kind of pigeon, (2) a vine' and woomera. As settlement advanced there were further borrowings from the more easterly languages. From Wiradhuri come billabong and corella ' white cockatoo' and from other New South Wales sources bilby ' rabbit bandicoot', budgerigar, mulga ' an acacia', also 'the outback', and (from Kamilaroi) yarran also 'an acacia'. Other words were borrowed in Victoria {bunyip' mythical river monster', lowan 'mallee-fowl, a large mound-building bird', luderick 'black-fish', mallee ' scrubby eucalypt', mia-mia' an Aboriginal hut', andyabby' a freshwater crustacean') or from Queensland (barramundi 'giant perch', humpy ' Aboriginal hut \yakka' work') or from South Australia (callop ' golden perch', wurley ' Aboriginal hut'; there is a detailed account of South Australian borrowings in Knight 1988), or from Tasmania (lubra 'Aboriginal woman', boobialla 'large shrub, a species of Myoporum') or Western Australia (Jarrah 'Western Australian eucalypt', kylie 'boom- erang'). Though the listed words are fairly generally known, they are not universally known to Australians and there is some regional variation in such knowledge (Ramson 1964). Except for one or two striking items like boomerang and kangaroo, which have become inter- national, the words have little semantic complexity. It will be noticed that the first contact, with coastal New South Wales, was the chief source of borrowing and the source of the best-known words (other than kangaroo), though some of them (e.g. koala, dingo) did not fully displace English descriptions {native bear, native dog) until a period of growing nationalism a century after their first appearance. It will also be noticed that most of the words borrowed from Aboriginal 306 English in Australia languages related to the flora and fauna of the new country and Aboriginal weapons and customs. Influence the other way, from English to Aboriginal languages, is much more pervasive. A pidgin means of communication between newcomers and the Aboriginal population developed, perhaps aided by the previous experience in Tahiti and elsewhere of seafaring visitors to the colony (Miihlhausler 1991: 169). Even some Australianisms in English may have passed via Aboriginal pidgin from English back into English. This is a likely source totjumbuck' sheep', perhaps ftomjump up (Ramson 1966: 107). At present whitefellow from Aboriginal pidgin is nudging its way into general English, and walkabout, originally an Aboriginal period of wandering in the bush, now has royal patronage. Some Port Jackson words were spread to other districts, where they were accepted as part of a pidgin English. Horses made a profound and rather frightening impression on the Aboriginal people and names spread ahead of the animals. Yarraman is possibly from Dhurga, the language spoken in Bateman's Bay on the east coast (Ramson 1966: 107). It may relate to the wordj/'ra 'teeth' (Blake 1981: 107) as horses were feared for their power to bite. In South Australia the horse was called pindi nanto ' the newcomers' kangaroo' (Teichelmann & Schiir- mann 1840: 27). Both yarraman and a form of nanto reached Central Australia as words for 'horse' (Reynolds 1982: 13; Knight 1988: 155). Along with such words, and not distinguished from them since etymology is not part of a user's current knowledge of the language, were genuine English words, not always without change of meaning. The word wheelbarrow became a general word for 'a vehicle'; 'a fire- wheelbarrow ' is a literal translation of the word for ' train' in one area (Dixon 1980: 122). Borrowing reflects the words current in the source language at the time and among the people that the native people were likely to meet. Thus gammon 'humbug', a marginal word in current English, is a very frequent word in pidgin forms of English. Again, the use of a word might precede contact with its ultimate donors. The Pitjantjatjara makiti 'gun' derives its name from musket but though a form mukkety is recorded by Ernest Giles as used to describe a cartridge by an Aboriginal boy at Ross' Waterhole, 90 miles from Peake, in 1873 (Giles 1889, I: 141), it seems safe to assume that muskets had been superseded by rifles when Europeans made significant contact with the people of the Western Desert. Miihlhausler (personal communication) has used the metaphor of a weed, which spreads without the deliberate agency of 3°7 George W. Turner Europeans even to areas where Europeans have not been themselves, to describe the similar spread of English linguistic elements through a region. It is becoming increasingly evident (Holm 1989: 540—1; Miihlhausler, personal communication) that Australian pidgin had far- reaching influence on pidgin languages, even further afield in the Pacific region. A pidgin language is nobody's first language. It is used in a situation of contact between speakers of different languages, the main adjustment being made by the people assuming the inferior status. Thus pidgin English is largely English in vocabulary. A pidgin language may become creolised, replacing the first language of one group of its speakers. This has happened in the Roper River area of the Northern Territory of Australia (Sandefur 1979; Holm 1989: 542-3). A de- velopment of this kind can be rapid, children developing a form of language unintelligible to their parents (Muhlhausler forthcoming). The tendency is always towards a metropolitan standard language (Miihlhausler, personal communication). Only recently has the variety of contact languages and restructured English been properly realised and much research remains to be done. Muhlhausler sets out a list of tasks at the end of his paper (forthcoming). A creole language is to be distinguished from Aboriginal English, a form of English with varying amounts of influence from an Aboriginal substratum (Douglas 1976: 10-12; Dixon 1980: 74-7; Blake 1981: 68). Holm (1989: 538) uses the term 'restructured English in Australia' to refer to ' a continuum of varieties spoken by Aboriginal people, ranging from contact jargon, pidgin, and creole to post-creole Aboriginal English' remarking that 'today most Aborigines speak some form of restructured English and many also speak standard or regional Australian English to varying degrees of proficiency'. The teaching of standard English to speakers of Aboriginal English is an important application of linguistic theory in present-day Australia (Gardiner 1977). Recently Kriol (Australian creole) has been adopted for oral work and initial literacy in some Aboriginal schools (Holm 1989: 543). 6.4.2 The convicts There is argument whether the founding of a prison was the chief or only motive for founding Australia (Tench 1961:118-19; Blainey 1966: 27-33), but for the historian of language it is one that is unlikely to be overlooked. Prisoners and their keepers have a language of their own, 308 English in Australia able to cope with the technical subtleties of crime or its prevention. Like other technical languages it is characterised by very general terms and very particular terms. One word describes a complex of attributes; prudence, economy in acting, abilities arising from long experience, the accomplishing of a project in a masterly manner, are all semantic elements in one word, judgement'; on the other hand a special condition ' having been divested of one's watch' has its own term unthimbled (Vaux 1964: 247, 277). As in other occupational sublanguages, words acquired enhanced precision of meaning. In strict usage traps were not just any policemen but officers or runners. Some words belonged to the language of the police rather than their prey. To weigh forty referred to a practice of letting a prig ('thief') reign ('follow his career') unmolested until he committed a capital crime when his arrest might bring a reward of forty pounds (Vaux 1964: 279). It seems, however, that sometimes the convict was a better linguist than the keeper, and that an interpreter was necessary to translate the deposition of a witness or the defence of a prisoner in the courts (Tench 1961: 297). Much of the language of the prison was sheer exuberant slang with no purpose beyond asserting group solidarity, perhaps disguising inten- tions from a victim, or delight or competitiveness in communal verbal art. There was no other need to say lag'd for his wind rather than 'transported for life'. It is the classic example of an anti-language (Halliday 1976), the language of an anti-society, acting out a different social structure with its own hierarchies. The above and other examples of flash language (or kiddy language, Tench 1961: 297) were recorded by a convicted petty thief in 1812 while he was in Newcastle, New South Wales. James Hardy Vaux was not intending to record a regional (Australian) form of English but an occupational one. Many of the technicalities of criminal life would later disappear or remain the speciality of thieves, and much of the slang would be as ephemeral as most slang is, but some relics of the convicts' jargon recorded by Vaux have found their way into general Australian English. Perhaps best known are the pair new chum and old hand. Vaux (1964: 232) tells us that a chum was 'a fellow prisoner in a jail, hulk &c' so that there were new chums and old chums as they happened to have been a short or a long time in confinement. Both terms continued in use long after the convict era, and new chum is still current as a contemptuous or patronising term for 'a tyro or novice'. Old chum has been mainly replaced by old hand, itself with convict associations once as it referred to an ex-convict, 309 George W. Turner but now with the general English overtones of respect for a practical workman or experienced person. Another well-established word is swag, originally 'a bundle or package', particularly ' a thief s loot', now given a different specification in the swag 'rolled-up belongings' carried by a swagman or 'tramp'. These words are historical now, but swag lives on in the sense 'large quantity' (a swag of letters to answer). New chum and swag appear to be known throughout Australia (and New Zealand, which until it failed to participate in Federation in 1901 belonged to a loose community of Australian colonies), as do some other originally cant expressions such as throw off at ' ridicule' with its variants sling off at, chuck off at. Togs 'bathing suit' appears to be confined to the Eastern States (where it competes with cossie and, recently, swimmers), the word being bathers in South Australia and Western Australia, but togs has remained in general use in New Zealand. Not perhaps surprisingly, the words deriving from convict use are best known in the states which were once convict settlements. South Australians or New Zealanders might not share in such accepted Australianisms as ding' throw away', drum' (confidential) information or advice' perhaps, though early citations are lacking, from drummond ' an infallible scheme', based on Drummond & Co, a bank in Charing Cross (Vaux 1964: 238),grey 'double-headed or double-tailed coin', lag '(vb) transport', '(n.) transported criminal', molly-dooker 'a left-handed person' from mauley 'a hand', push 'bunch of larrikins', later 'group of like-minded people', ridge, ridgie-didge' good, genuine' from ridge' gold', serve 'a reprimand' (Vaux serve 'maim, wound'), shake 'steal' or traps 'police'. A similarity between items in Vaux's list and modern Australian idiom does not guarantee a direct or continuous link between the convicts and the present day. In many cases there is a large gap in time between Vaux and the first dictionary record of a word. A serve, for example, is dated only from 1974 (or 1967 in the meaning 'thrashing'). We can accept that words like grey, connected with two-up (gambling) schools, or lag or trap or school itself' a party of persons met together for the purpose of gambling' (Vaux 1964:263) might survive in underworld slang, and even more general slang does not easily find its way into writing, but other possible channels for cant terms to pass into everyday use have to be kept in mind. Some terms (beak 'magistrate', lark ' prank', split' betray by informing', put-up job, stow it' be quiet' as well as swag 'loot' andprad'horse') are found, for instance, in Oliver Twist. 310 [...]... Flexner 1 960 : 283) Both myths neglect the small farmer, the cocky managing by enlisting the help of his whole family, another form of slavery, or the country women savagely revealed in the bush stories of Barbara Baynton They neglect, too, the divisions within the station, the contempt of the stockman for the crawler or shepherd and the gradation from the house of the owner or manager via the barracks... fellows) and not far offa party of Melbourne men All these men are on an equality as to their pursuit Did the well-bred men descend to the general manners of their surroundings? As a rule, no The roughest of the men see and adopt, as far as they can, the manners of the gentlemen That not all adopted the idiom of the gentlemen is suggested by William Howitt's account (Keesing 1 967 : 144) of' language not to... muster of prisoners or soldiers or the early equivalent of the modern census The superintendent of the station and the huts of the men became the models for the sheep and cattle stations of the pastoral industry of later years Early Sydney was a coastal settlement The outlets of the small streams of the area into the sea were called creeks, in accordance with general English usage, but it is difficult... adstrate languages, or by universals or internal innovation, or by the convergence of two or more of these factors The common features of the Atlantic Creoles, whatever the source of their lexicon, suggest that they form a typological group of languages sui generis While any claim of their genetic relatedness would have to rest on the genetic relatedness of their superstrates on the one hand and their... dozens of histories of English in particular islands or territories These histories are complex, with over three and a half centuries of dates of settlements, wars, economic upheavals and migrations A further difficulty is that the story of the spread of English in the West Indies and surrounding area does not always coincide with the history of the spread of British political power in the region There... influenced 334 English in the Caribbean by Creole by the end of the seventeenth century, with only a tiny minority of upper-class whites speaking anything approaching standard English (Le Page & DeCamp 1 960 : 1 15- 16) In most population movements white settlers brought their slaves (who often outnumbered them), so the introduction of English- speakers into new areas of the Caribbean after the middle of the seventeenth... study of the vocabulary, see Ramson (1 966 ) 3^7 7 ENGLISH IN THE CARIBBEAN John A Holm 7.1 Introduction The history of English in the West Indies is unlike that of other former colonies like Australia, Canada, New Zealand and South Africa There, English was spoken from the start predominantly by settlers from the British Isles, who passed it on to their descendants and others largely through the normal... force in the development of these dialects, as has their contact with uncreolised English 7.2 The spread of English and Creole in the West Indies It is difficult to gain a clear overview of how English and Creole spread in the West Indies - whether as standard or regional British, Caribbean or North American English, or as English- based pidgins and Creoles The general history of English in the region... number of typological features, and sometimes these happened to coincide with those of the relevant African languages (e.g the predominant order of the main sentence elements: subject-verb-object) Furthermore, there seem to be some universal tendencies in the restructuring of languages since all adults appear to have certain strategies for learning another 33° English in the Caribbean language One of these... reference for the history of individual words Earlier general studies of Australian English, except for Baker (1 966 ) (the Mencken of Australian English studies) are now out of print, for example, Turner (1 966 , much revised in 1972), or the collection English Transported (Ramson 1970) Current trends can be studied in the collection edited by Collins & Blair (1989) The Sydney University Australian Language . understood in southern England, though it is known in many dialects in Scotland, Northern Ireland and the north-east of England. 6. 4 Lexis: history 6. 4.1 The Aboriginal languages If the history of language. the language of the pink strangers has replaced most of the original languages, usually without even recording them. The first English settlers in Australia neglected to name the human part of. 54 3). 6. 4.2 The convicts There is argument whether the founding of a prison was the chief or only motive for founding Australia (Tench 1 961 :118-19; Blainey 1 966 : 27-33), but for the historian of language