English Language In Australia

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Australia: The History Remnants of the old British Imperialism are still found today in the different varieties of the English language we encounter in the former colonies. Amongst its major varieties, there is Australian English, used in Australia, that differs from British English and other varieties in a number of aspects, primarily accent and vocabulary. But what happened in Australia? Europeans were not the first to inhabit the Australian continent. 50,000 years ago, the land was occupied by the ancestors of the indigenous population, the Aboriginals, who lived by hunt and gathering and believed that the Land was not theirs to own, but that they belonged to the Land like a child to its mother. This, later on, brought to the false conviction…show more content…
Many of the convicts sent to Australia were from Ireland, Scotland and Wales, so they imported languages that differed from English along with a wide range of different English dialects. The children assimilated the speech they heard around them, creating a new dialect that new settlers in the 1800s thought was similar to Cockney English, spoken by the working class of London. Some elements of the Aboriginal Language were adopted by Australian English, especially the names of the new fauna and animals characteristic of the continent (dingo, kangaroo, boomerang, wallaby). Many Australian cities are also named with Aboriginal words, like Canberra, the capital of Australia, that means “meeting place”. Other examples…show more content…
• Cooee: it’s a high pitched call able to travel long distances, used for attracting attention. • Bung: a word meaning “dead”, or also “broken” or “useless”. Other words like okay, you guys and gee come from the American influence after World War II. Phonological Features • Long vowels mostly correspond to tense vowels of Received Pronunciation (/ʉ:/ goose, /i:/ heat, /e:/ square, /ɜː/ bird, /æː/ bad, /aː/ bath, /oː/ north) , while short vowels correspond to lax vowels (/ʊ/ foot, /ɪ/ bid, /e/ head, /ə/ winter, /æ/ had, /a/ strut, /ɔ/ hot). • The weak-vowel merger is complete unless if followed by a velar consonant : /ə/ and unstressed /ɪ/ merge together. (ie. rabbit) • Australian English is non-rhotic. • Alveolar flapping: /t/ and /d/ are replaced by the alveolar tap [ɾ] after sonorants and at the end of a word. (ie. better [ˈbeɾə]) • The wine-whine merger is complete: the voiceless /hw/ is reduced to voiced /w/ (ie. wine/whine, witch/which) • Yod dropping, the elision of the sound [j], for example: /l/ blue [ˈbluː], /s/ suit [ˈsuːt], /tʃ/ chew [ˈtʃuː], /dʒ/ juice [ˈdʒuːs]), /ɹ/ rude

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