University of Regensburg
WS 2002/03 

Australian and New Zealand impact on the English Language

by

 Andreas Hennings

Table of Content

1. Introduction 3

2. Australian English 4
2.1 Historical Development of Australian English 4
2.2 A Linguistic Analysis of Australian English

3. New Zealand English 7
3.1 Development 7
3.2 Linguistic Analysis 8

4. Conclusion

5. References

1. Introduction

English is the most important language of the world today. Last century’s quantum leaps in information technologies, like the Internet, enabled us for the first time in history to communicate with people from all over the world. The world-wide transfer of information in a global community requires a lingua franca, a language that is understood and can be used by everybody. Artificial languages, like Esperanto, have not attracted many learners - a language without a past can have no future.

Instead, English and its numberless variants seem to be able to solve communication problems in the future. No other language is so widespread, so commonly understood around the globe. Obviously, the outstanding position of the USA in the fields of politics, economics, science, and - most important - popular culture like pop music and cinema has contributed to this fact.

The British Empire has laid the fundament for this development by founding colonies all over the world, exporting their language even to the opposite side of the globe - Australia and New Zealand. Like everything else alive, languages in use are subject to change and development, especially in colonies, as new words are needed for new discoveries and ideas, or just to simplify communication with natives. Sometimes new ways of pronunciation come into fashion and spread until everyone has adjusted to them. In the course of the centuries, even completely new languages can come into existence this way.

In this paper I will examine linguistic particularities of Australian English (AusE) and New Zealand English (NZE) to find out if they are languages of their own, creoles or just variants of English. In order to make their development better understandable, I will combine historical facts about colonists, natives and language developments with linguistic analyses of today’s Australian and New Zealand English.

2. Australia

2.1 Historical Development of Australian English

Towards the end of the 18th century, the spreading British Empire started to found new colonies in the southern hemisphere to increase its economic and political power. The discovery of a “terra incognita“, a huge new continent in the far south-east by British, Dutch and Portuguese sailors, surely was interesting news to the British Crown. After Captain James Cook visited Australia in 1770 it took only twenty years until the first British penal colony was founded near the place where today the city of Sydney is located.¹

2.1.1 Prisoners

The prisons of London were overcrowded, since the former colonies in north America had gained their independence and refused to take any more convicts from the British Islands. Thus, after the so-called “First Fleet“ with prisoners arrived in 1788², about 130.000 of them were transferred to Australia within the first 50 years. Most of them were from cities and suburbs of southeast and middle Britain, especially London, where rural population, driven by industralisation, increasingly settled to escape from poverty. Nearly all of them were from the lower classes of society and are assumed to have spoken a common sociolect based on Cockney, the dialect of English spoken in London.

One fourth of the convicts transported to Australia were from Ireland,³ taken prisoners after the Irish rebellion. The Irish were able to understand and speak English at least as a second language, though their pronunciation was different. However, both groups were able to communicate with each other, and due to close contact in British prisons or later during their 8-months-transfer to Australia, some leveling of their dialects must have taken place.⁴ This process was fostered as the convicts had to live closely together and communicate in their penal colonies, and a commonly understood dialect developed which went on to be the basis for today’s Broad and General Australian English.

Although most new founded penal colonies were too far separated to allow language contact, nearly no regional differences in Australian English developed, as the new shiploads of convicts were relatively homogenous in their language; most of them came from southern England. The prisoners - especially the Irish - were divided and sent to different places, thus no closed communities with a language or dialect of their own could develop.⁵

2.1.2 Free Settlers

After 1793, not only convicts but also free settlers were brought to Australia. Among them were some American loyalists who had been fighting on British side during the war for independence and had to flee after the war was lost, inserting American English terms into Australian English. As immigration was restricted in the beginning, free settlers outnumbered the prisoners no earlier than 1840, but after the discovery of gold in New South Wales and Victoria, their numbers increased rapidly.⁶ In 1850, an estimated 400.000 immigrants lived in Australia, in 1900 they were about 4 million.⁷

Due to the increasing immigration of English-speaking settlers from Great Britain, Australian English stayed close to its British variant. Additionally, migration within Australia and the fact that most of the new immigrants arrived and stayed - at least for a certain period - in Sydney, leveled the different dialects and helped to develop a commonly understood Australian English. Even Chinese immigrants, brought to Australia as cheap workers for the gold mines since the 1870’s, had to give up their language and learn English as they were a minority and had no other chance if they wanted to communicate with non-Chinese fellow workers or employees.

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1 David Crystal, “English as a global language“, p. 35
2 David Crystal, “English as a global language“, p. 35
3 Gregory R. Guy, “Australia“, p. 217
4 George W. Turner, “English in Australia“, p.277
5 Hansen, Carls, Lucko, „Die Differenzierung des Englischen in nationale Varianten“, p. 157
6 Hansen, Carls, Lucko, „Die Differenzierung des Englischen in nationale Varianten“, p. 156
7 David Crystal, “English as a global language“, p. 35