Hi everyone!
In today’s article, I want to look at an example of Australian English in action and how you can identify features within this text. How will this help you in your upcoming SACs in term 3? Well, if you know WHY Australian English is the way it is, then you can easily identify features and interlink them to cultural values 🙂 Great for essays!
Firstly, have a good read of the article here: http://www.theage.com.au/news/entertainment/arts/losing-lingo/2009/04/30/1240982342359.htmlÂ
Yes, it’s a bit old. But the language doesn’t really change and if anything much of it is quintessentially Australian. It’s quite a good text to analyse in terms of Aussie English (see what I did there?).
To give you some hints, I would recommend taking a look at a few different noticeable features:
- Diminutives (morphology)
- Lexemes of indigenous origins (lexicology)
- Inference (coherence)
- Australian colloquialisms (lexicology)
- Vowel length – phonemic (phonology)
Try and identify these features in the above text (either explicitly mentioned or implicit) and then write down a reason as to WHY these features are quintessentially Australian. For example:
It’s an accent that has its roots in the Anglo-Celtic Catholic working class largely spread by Marist and Christian brother missionaries who travelled as far north as Bundoora to wipe the sound “aitch” from the vocab of generations of young Austryians, and introduced the all-purpose word “classic” to describe any situation life might throw at you.
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