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World Englishes, Vol 18, No. 2, pp. 259270, 1999.

08832919

Standard Australian English


ARTHUR DELBRIDGE*
ABSTRACT: The author traces the development of the concept Australian English from the 1940s to the present time, noting a radical change in both public and individual acceptance of it. He briefly surveys the extent of the scholarly documentation of Australian English in dictionaries and style manuals, and addresses the question of Australianness in a range of text types and registers.

The use of this term would surprise most Australians even now, two hundred or more years after English was brought to these shores by the first British settlers (1788). Yet it is listed and defined in the Oxford Companion to the English Language (1992) as the twentiethcentury term for `the standard English of Australia', and this definition is supported by a 1987 citation from an official government report: `As the national variety of English in Australia, Standard Australian English ought to be used with confidence in Australia and overseas' (Joseph Lo Bianco, 1987). But fifty years ago the term `Australian English' was unknown in Australia, where the common view was that to the extent that it was different from British English the English used in Australia was a deformed and objectional product of an isolated antipodean community, its local vocabulary outlandish, and its accent regrettable. `Teachers' said a prominent educationist, `must do their utmost to check this development away from standard English' (S. H. Smith, NSW Director of Education, 1920). The English used by Australians was commonly judged to be unacceptable, yet the population was almost entirely monolingual, and English was its language. In the year 1901, the year in which Australia emerged out of its colonial status to become the (more or less) self-governing Commonwealth of Australia, a population census was taken. This census showed that 77% of the people had been born in Australia, 10% in England and Wales, 3% in Scotland, and 5% in Ireland all English-speaking countries. (That census did not count the comparatively very small population of indigenous Aborigines. None of the numerous Aboriginal languages had a written form, and they had no influence on the language scene in the British colony, except in some lexical borrowings.) How did Australian English in fifty years get from that to its present position of having a national standard form, recognised as such in the Oxford Companion? But the question goes even further now that Tom McArthur, in his editorial for English Today (McArthur, 1996), has expressed the view that in the new world order of Englishes (the pecking order, as he calls it) the United States of America comes first, the United Kingdom second, and (as he is inclined to argue, taking other possibilities into account), Australia comes third. The critical period for this transformation was the 1930s and, especially, the 1940s. What had happened to English in Australia before that, right from the commencement date of British settlement as a penal outpost (1788), is ill-documented and still the subject of intense speculation and research, here to be touched on only briefly. There had been the
* Linguistics Department, Macquarie University 2109, Australia. E-mail: adelbrid@pip.elm.mq.edu.au
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comments of visitors to the colony, like the one made by a Mrs Charles Meredith (1844) in her Notes and Sketches of New South Wales, During a Residence in that Colony from 1838 to 1844, in which she made the observation that `A very large proportion of both male and female natives [Ed. that is, children born in the colony, usually of British parents] snuffle dreadfully; just the same nasal twang as many Americans have' (Meredith, 1844). In 1887 a fairly comprehensive and professional account of what later became known as `the Australian accent' was made by Samuel McBurney (1889), as a result of his extensive observations of Australian speech in the then most heavily populated parts of Australia. His account was published as Part Five of Alexander Ellis's Early English Pronunciation. In spite of difficulties in his notation of sound values, it is now apparent that diphthongs closely resembling the diphthongs of the broader vowels of today's Australian accent were to be heard then, in 1887. He was inclined to characterise these sounds as Cockney. `But why' he says, `there should be a general tendency, as there undoubtedly is in Australia, to a Cockney pronunciation . . . is still a mystery to be explained' (McBurney, 1889). Meanwhile, the extensive Australianising of the lexicon had been observed. For `there never was an instance in history', said Edward E. Morris (1972), `when so many new names were needed, and there never will be such an occasion again, for never did settlers come, nor can they ever again come, upon Flora and Fauna so completely different from anything seen by them before'. So he prepared a dictionary of `all the new words and the new uses of old words that have been added to the English language by reason of the fact that those who speak English have taken up their abode in Australia, Tasmania and New Zealand.' He called it Austral English: A Dictionary of Australasian Words Phrases and Usages. It was a partial account of the lexis of English transported, comprehensive enough on flora and fauna, informative on the social structures of the convict era, but sparing in its treatment of the colloquialism of nineteenth-century Australians. One aspect of colloquialism had already been usefully covered in A New and Comprehensive Vocabulary of the Flash Language (James Hardy Vaux, 1819), ironically presented by its convict author to a magistrate, as an aid in communication with those who came before him on criminal charges. Also Karl Lentzner had published his Colonial English in 1891, with its 50-page listing of `Australian and bush slang'; W. H. Downing his Digger Dialects in 1919, a record of the slang of the Australian military forces of World War One; and Joshua Lake brought Australasian words to international attention by his 1898 Australasian Supplement to Webster's International Dictionary, though in later editions this list was incorporated alphabetically in the main text, and so lost its impact. In the 1920s and 30s the groundswell of uneasiness about the local forms of English was at its height.1 The complaints were led by educationists and professional bodies, and were loudly taken up by ordinary citizens, though not without temperate opposition, especially from those whose sense of and respect for national identity repudiated any proposal to make the local forms of English conform to a particular British model. A leading article in the Daily Telegraph (22 December 1926) reported wearily that `The Christmas school reports have again yielded their annual crop of homilies upon the vulgar impropriety of Australians speaking in an accent peculiar to their country.' But Mr S. H. Smith, in a speech opening the 1926 annual Teachers' Conference in Sydney, expressed the view that
There is no such thing as Australian grammar or Australian spelling. Why should there be any distinctive Australian speech? It is sad to reflect that other people are able to recognise Australians by their speech. Unfortunately many of the characteristics in our dialect are reminiscent of, if not
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identical with, those of uneducated people elsewhere. They are faults which are associated in the minds and ears of millions of English-speaking people with crude, mis-shapen, careless English. If we must follow a dialect of English in Australia, why not follow one of the charming ones? Why follow the ugliest that exists? [by which he meant Cockney!] (Evening News, 20 December 1926)

The whole chorus of condemnation and concern along these lines was directed almost exclusively at habits of speech:
. `It is not only the abominable diphthonging of the vowels; it is the harsh nasal voice, the slovenly elision of half the consonants, that offend the ear; and this offence will never cease until English phonetics are taught in the schools.' (Telegraph, 24 August 1923) . `It is ruined by bad voice production, which is mainly due to laziness, flattened vowels and inadequate use of the tongue, lips and cheek.' (The Sun, 25 September 1940) . `No doubt climatic conditions are contributory factors in our indifferent diction; so too are environment, poverty of vocabulary and the lack of intellectual identification with the meaning and mood of the writer.' (`Womerah' in Sydney Morning Herald, 28 December 1933)

The positive side of the debate had no champion until 1940, when Alexander George Mitchell, formerly a tutor in the English Department in Sydney University, returned with his PhD from University College, London, where he had come under the influence of Daniel Jones. Among his fellow-students there was an American who, in class, told Daniel Jones how she looked forward, under his tutelege, to replacing her American accent with the Received Pronunciation of English, only to be sternly asked what she thought was wrong with her own accent, and why on earth would she want to replace it. Conscious of the debate back in Australia, Mitchell conceived the idea of asking the same questions of those people in Australia who thought ill of Australian pronunciation and were calling for reform. Once back home in Australia, he confronted the English Association, which had been formed in 1923 with the aim (among other things) of `doing something to improve Australian pronunciation'. His lecture to the Association (Mitchell, 1940) certainly intensified the debate, but, more importantly, it led to an invitation for him to give a series of broadcast lectures for the Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC), lectures with titles like Does the Australian Accent Make You Shudder?, Australian Speech Is Here to Stay, and There is Nothing Wrong with Australian Speech. These were published in The ABC Weekly, which had an Australia-wide circulation. The ABC then invited `a number of citizens with special interest in the subject to contribute to a symposium of views'. Some twenty of these views were then published in the same journal (19 July 1942 and 26 July 1942). The contributors ranged from Mr R. G. Menzies, then just at the end of his first period as Prime Minister of Australia, to an anonymous `Sensitive Auricular Nerves'. There was some sitting on the fence, and some faint praise, but the majority favoured the notion that `we can hardly expect respect for a language bred of carelessness out of ignorance still less to find it considered as acceptable and as pleasant as good English.' What Mitchell had attempted to establish was that there are varieties of Australian pronunciation two, in fact, which he labelled `educated' and `broad' and that Australian pronunciation `takes its place among the national forms of English, as much entitled to respectful consideration as any other. It has its own history and is not a corrupt derivation of anything.' So Mitchell's assertion of Australian English as the natural and inevitable variety for the Australian people had a generally hostile reception, in spite of his good reputation as a scholar. Looking back on the public debate he had contributed to so valiantly, he later
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confessed that it had been very hard to get a sympathetic hearing for his defence of the Australian accent: `It was denounced as no more than a neutral document that whatever is is right, that it tolerated and encouraged what was slovenly and slipshod. It was even said that it implied a contempt for Australians by suggesting that any old kind of speech was good enough for them' (Mitchell, 1965: 134). But that is not the end of the story. Meanwhile another approach was being made, this time by a journalist, Sidney J. Baker, concentrating on the lexis of what he called `The Australian Language'. `A new language', he claimed, calling for a new name and a new description based on the examination of Australian history `in terms of the popular speech we have developed as incidental to our cultural growth' (Baker, 1945: 11). Not for him the tame, staid recital of names showing (as Morris had shown) what had been added to the English language `by reason of the fact that those who speak English have taken up their abode in Australia . . .' Instead, he concentrated on the colloquial language of ordinary Australians, in real life and as depicted in Australian literature. `If the Australian language is something to be reckoned with it is because the boundary riders, larrikins, sundowners, fizgigs, diggers, and other dinkum Aussies who evolved it are something to be reckoned with also' (Baker, 1945: 36). Baker's stridency of tone and his concentration on slang have both been seen as excessive; the name `The Australian Language' (owing much to Mencken) did not catch on, and the claims he made for the newness and unique inventiveness of English in Australia are exaggerated. But his contribution to the emerging concept of a distinct variety of English has nevertheless been important. There have been various attempts at naming the variety: Morris's `Austral English' was too early, even for public acknowledgement of the concept itself, `English in Australia' is too tame; `Australian English' is widely used, though there are some who still take that name to be synonymous with slang. (When the first edition of the Macquarie Dictionary was published in 1981, the publisher declined to have it named The Macquarie Dictionary of Australian English, on the grounds that it would be widely believed to have nothing in it but slang.) But `Australian English' is now well established in academic and official usage as the name for the variety in both its formal and informal manifestations. Although the initial and crucial moves were made in the 1940s, the elaboration of the concept and its general public acceptance have occupied all the intervening time till now. Mitchell's personal influence continued to be vital in areas of great public concern, especially national broadcasting, schooling, and university teaching and research, even up to the time of his lamented death in October 1997, at the age of 86.
NATIONAL BROADCASTING

The Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC) was established in 1932 to broadcast nationwide programs of high quality `in the interests of the community'. In its early years dependence on the BBC as a model was apparent, in language as in much else. Even as late as 1941, the then chairman of the Commission, W. J. Cleary, expressed the view that `Australian speech is slightly objectionable . . . Every quest for announcers has revealed that the number of men most suitable have been Englishmen.' To the extent that language issues were in the air for Australians in this period, the issues were still about improvement and correctness, not about the choice of a particular variety of English. A Pronunciation Advisory Committee was set up in the ABC in 1944, to make recommendations for the pronunciations of particular words and to compile a list of Australian place-names, with
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recommendations for their pronunciation. Although A. G. Mitchell was a member of this committee, there was no move away from the BBC model until the Commissioners at length recognised that `the pronunciation of some words in Australia does vary slightly from the English usage'. Under a new name, and with Mitchell as chairman, in 1952 the committee urged that the ABC's general pronunciation policy should acknowledge the reality of Australian English. Strangely enough, the committee adopted D. Jones's English Pronouncing Dictionary (1917) as its primary source, though in fact its dependence on that British book (that focused so completely on the `received' pronunciations of the English public schools) rapidly decreased, with the growth of closer local observation of and research into Australian practice. It was in 1981 that the committee nominated the Macquarie Dictionary (Delbridge, 1981) (focused on Australian usage) as its first port of call for pronunciations. As to the appointment of broadcasters, the normal practice has been to choose speakers of a cultivated type of Australian English, though even that has depended on the requirements of particular programs. With the accelerating recognition of the multicultural and multilingual nature of the Australian population throughout the 1980s, the ABC's requirement was generalised to `acceptable styles of educated speech', with no specification of a particular speech variety in the broadcaster. In its later years the Standing Committee on Spoken English has been much less inclined to nominate a single pronunciation of a word or name as its enforceable recommendation, but has recognised the broadcaster's right to continue to use any well-attested variant pronunciation that is shown to be acceptable in educated Australian use. The range of its interests has also widened to the many questions of discourse and style that arise in both scripted and unscripted broadcasting.
SCHOOLING

Traditionally schoolteachers are conservative in their use of language and inclined to favor notions of conformity and correctness in their language teaching programs. Until fairly recently their training had not had much linguistics in it, and consequently not much encouragement to examine the validity of their professional views about language, especially language standards and standardisation. But since the days of Mr S. H. Smith, quoted above, Australian teachers have completely overcome the endemic cultural cringe about the admittedly vague notion of a British language standard which should be aimed at in schools. One of the important elements in this process of change was a rather large research project initiated by A. G. Mitchell in the early 1960s to test his earlier analysis of a two-tier structure of the Australian accent, by gathering samples of speech from all regions of Australia, and to confirm (or disprove) the belief that Australian English was geographically uniform throughout the whole continent. Working with a colleague, and with the full official support and approval of all the secondary-school systems in all the Australian states, he gathered tape-recordings of informal conversations between senior high-school pupils and their teachers, in a uniform format, and subjected the resulting 9,000 plus recordings to a strictly controlled auditory analysis which was then correlated with a battery of personal and socio-economic information about each of the participants. The analysis was centred on the vowel sounds of Australian English, and revealed a reasonably even spectrum of phonetic variability which could justifiably be categorised into three sections, of which the central one was numerically the largest, with two smaller sections on each side. The central one, labelled `General', represents the most
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frequently met variety of Australian English speech; on one side is `Cultivated', which comes closest to British Received Pronunciation, and the other side is `Broad', which is perhaps the most distinctive. All three varieties are to be found in all parts of Australia, and with minor exceptions it remains true that one cannot make a reliable judgment on what region a speaker comes from on speech criteria alone. The variability within the spectrum depends mainly on personal factors such as sex, and on a mix of socio-linguistic factors (Mitchell and Delbridge, 1965). Although speech training cannot be said to have had a central place in the curricula of most school systems, studies such as Mitchell's did confront schools and curriculum makers with the reality of Australian English, and had a distinct effect on the focus of language teaching in Australia at all school levels. There have been good attempts made in some school systems at a linguistics-based English curriculum, using one or another of the current theories, but even where these might have foundered, the linguistic concepts of conformity and variability within a language system have had profound effects in the teaching of both literature and language.
UNIVERSITY TEACHING AND RESEARCH

Starting in the early 1940s, especially in the English Department of Sydney University, there have been coursework programs in Australian English at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels, gradually growing in comprehensiveness and depth until by now it is usual for students anywhere in departments of English, linguistics, and education to be offered, even required to take, some coursework in that subject. Courses on contemporary English language tend to take Australian English as the focal point from which comparisons with other major varieties are made. Postgraduate research has produced a considerable body of theses on the phonetics, phonology, lexis, and grammar of the variety, much of it being laboratory-based, using the well-equipped facilities of the Australian National University, Queensland University, Monash, Macquarie, Melbourne University, and others. There is a thin and somewhat blurred line between postgraduate and professional academic work, since the one so often becomes the other. But a perusal of the titles of papers published in the Journal of the Australian Linguistic Society shows that, along with the Aboriginal languages, Australian English is clearly a major field of study for contributing linguists. The same balance is apparent in the papers of the Applied Linguistics Association. Since the early 1940s, a number of monographs have been published, along with some collected essays on aspects of Australian English. A few of these are listed in the notes.2
LEXICOGRAPHY IN AUSTRALIA

Until about twenty-five years ago, there was a general assumption among Australians that their dictionaries would come from overseas, from the presses of Oxford or WebsterMerriam chiefly; that these dictionaries, produced for international distribution, would meet Australian needs perfectly well, indeed might even help to keep Australian usage from straying too shamefully from the requirements of Standard English. Yet such assumptions have by now been so radically called into question, and the profession of lexicography so developed, especially in Australian universities, that in 1990 an Australian Association for Lexicography was founded, with an initial membership of some 150
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lexicographers, publishers, editors, and others with kindred interests, active especially in various dictionaries of Australian English, of the languages of Aboriginal peoples, and of the languages other than English in use among the more or less recently arrived immigrants from other parts of the world. As to Australian English, in spite of the fact that there had been a good deal of serious study of Australian lexis, this had not resulted in a dictionary that focused on it. In 1976 Oxford University Press Australia issued an Australianised version of the Pocket Oxford Dictionary, edited by Graham Johnston, in which words believed to be distinctively Australian were labelled Austral. But still no comprehensive dictionary appeared comparable with, say, even the Concise Oxford Dictionary of Current English or the American College Dictionary, no book for people seriously wanting to consult Australian lexical usage. But since then there have been at least three major publications which between them have filled the lexicographic gap. These are A Dictionary of Australian Colloquialisms (Wilkes, 1978), The Macquarie Dictionary (Delbridge et al., 1981), and The Australian National Dictionary (Ramson, 1988). Before Wilkes there had been a number of more minor attempts to present Australian slang and colloquialism as the most striking and distinctive aspect of Australian English, and even as a distinctive trait in the national character. Our novelists of social realism had tended to foreground slang in dialogue in the portrayal of their personae. Wilkes's dictionary is drawn largely but not exclusively from Australian fiction (he held the chair of Australian Literature in Sydney University while he was writing it). But it is a wellbalanced account, making no exaggerated claims for the quality of Australian colloquialism. Its historical method, with generous dated citations, gives a solid basis for conclusions about the period of currency of the headwords and the development of their various senses. Its fourth revised edition has appeared in 1996. The Macquarie Dictionary (Delbridge et al., 1981, 1991, 1997) was intended to be the first Australian dictionary to offer a comprehensive word list in which all the pronunciations, all the spellings, and all the definitions of meaning are taken from the use of English in Australia, and in which Australian English becomes the basis of comparison with other national varieties of English. It was hoped that no longer would Australians wishing to consult the usage of their own community find that the only available dictionaries were focused on the usage of communities in the northern hemisphere. It was devised as an unashamedly national dictionary. The hopes of its writers have been realised amply, and there is now a wide-spread perception of the Macquarie as the first-port-of-call dictionary for Australian users. It has been adopted by many organisations in government, in education, in broadcasting and journalism, and is frequently cited in courts of law and in the press. Macquarie Library Pty Ltd, publisher of the dictionary, has also published a number of spin-off dictionaries drawn from the same large database, and with the same team of writers and editors. These include a large companion thesaurus, and sets of dictionaries and thesauruses of different sizes, for users with different educational needs, with twenty volumes now in print. The Australian National Dictionary (Ramson, 1988) was published in 1988 by Oxford University Press Australia. Its editor, W. S. Ramson, then of the Australian National University, Canberra, is a leading figure in the study of the history of Australian English. It is a dictionary of Australianisms, written on the same historical principles as The Oxford English Dictionary, with its entries drawn from the close reading of nearly 10,000 books
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and papers with Australian associations, wherever published. The dictionary consists of about 6,000 main entries, each of which treats a word or phrase judged to be distinctively Australian. The generous provision of citations establishes the chronology of each word's use, substantiates the definitions, and illustrates the range of registers within which it has been used. It is the first historical dictionary of Australian English since Morris, and the only comprehensive one. There were difficulties, of course, in establishing strong claims for an Australian origin for many words, even with citations that antedated those of British or American dictionaries. It therefore seemed best to the editor to interpret Australianism liberally, `not making undue claims but including many words which are of undoubted significance in the Australian context but about the precise origin of which there remains uncertainty'. Some 400 borrowings from Aboriginal languages are recorded, and for the first time in Australian lexicography the etymologies in most cases identify the source Aboriginal language, a reflection of the advanced state of knowledge of the over 200 Aboriginal languages that had been in use at the time of the first European settlement, when Aboriginal contact was lexically most productive. The Australian National Dictionary has become an indispensible tool for historians and literary scholars, as well as a source of interest in the general population, for the latter notably in its concise format edited by Joan Hughes (1993).
THE NATIONAL POLICY ON LANGUAGES

The vigorous programs of immigration pursued by a succession of federal governments from the period dominated by World War II to the present day have carried with them a realisation of the need for a national policy on languages. In the multicultural policies adopted by Australia at least since the mid-1970s, language has been a dominant and complex feature. An analysis published in 1987 showed that of the then population of 16 million people:
. Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders comprised 1%. . People from United Kingdom and Ireland backgrounds of three or more generations comprised 60%. . Australians from non-English speaking backgrounds of three or more generations ago comprised 5%. . First and second generation English-speaking background Australians comprised 14%. . Second generation Australians of non-English speaking background comprised 8%. . First generation Australians of non-English speaking background comprised 12%. (Reported in Bianco, 1990.)

In the light of such demographic complexity and after much public and professional consultation, successive federal governments have worked towards policies that would address the educational, social, and economic aspects of both the problems and the resource opportunities presented by this multilingual complex. Eventually there appeared a report called National Policy on Languages, prepared by Joseph Lo Bianco (1987), espousing four principles for the balanced development and implementation of languages policy at the national level in Australia:
1. English for all 2. support for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island languages
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3. a language other than English for all (through both mother tongue maintenance and second language learning) 4. equitable and widespread language services.

Asian languages were strongly supported in the report. It was endorsed by the Prime Minister and subsequently by senior ministers, and in June 1987 the Government announced its commitment to providing nominated large sums for the implementation of a balanced package of programs under the rubric of the National Policy on Languages. In the early nineties there was some fine-tuning of policy directions, as part of the broader process of micro-economic and educational reform, with a strengthened strategy to promote literacy and language learning under the aegis of an Australian Literacy and Language Policy. The term literacy in this policy was used to mean literacy in English, and English `refers to the form of English generally used in Australia, Standard Australian English', it being noted that `While there may be some variation in spoken forms of Australian English, there are generally accepted standards of written English.' Here, then, to quote the words of Lo Bianco, is Australian English `taken into officialdom's bosom via language policy' (1994: 14). But there had meanwhile been important shifts in the concept of Australian English in the minds of linguists, teachers, sociologists and publishers even before this governmental recognition emerged. For example, in the first edition of the Macquarie Dictionary (1981) Australian English had been defined as `that dialect of English which is spoken by native-born Australians'. Now even if that had been an appropriate definition in 1981, it was not appropriate for the second (1991) edition, where the definition begins the same way but adds `and by other inhabitants of Australia whose speech and idiom in English has converged on that dialect sufficiently to be identified with it, as contrasting with British English, American English, and the other Englishes of the world.' For in multicultural Australia it is clear that there are many languages, enjoying absolute complementarity, including many varieties of English, and those including the varieties of Aboriginal English. What convergence there is towards Australian English by speakers of the other languages depends on individual will, as well as on the effects of education, intermarriage, employment, the mass media, and many other factors. What distinguishes Australian English from the rest is that it is virtually Australia's national language, used with remarkable homogeneity throughout Australia, and in international communication. Within Australia it is the language of the law, of government and of most commerce. It is described in government discussions as the `foundation language of our education, training and employment systems . . . the common medium for communication and the exchange of ideas across a population of widely varying ethnic and racial backgrounds, contributing significantly to social cohesion and economic efficiency' (Department of Employment, Education and Training, 1991: 32). Now, in the latter part of the nineties the national policy on languages is implemented through an organisation called Language Australia, working throughout the states in cooperation with education authorities, professional associations and universities. The funded research projects have so far included a Centre for Workplace Culture and Communication, Language and Technology Centre, Centre for Deafness and Communication Studies, Style Council Centre, Language Acquisition Research Centre, Language and Society Centre, Centre for Research and Development in Language and Literacy, Centre for Research and Development in Interpreting and Translating, Language Testing Research Centre, Language Testing and Curriculum Centre, and others. Of these, the one most
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directly concerned with delineating the concept of Standard Australian English is the Style Council Centre.
STANDARD AUSTRALIAN ENGLISH

The first Style Council held in Australia, in 1986, was an initiative of the Dictionary Research Centre, Macquarie University, in collaboration with Macquarie Library Pty Ltd, which publishes the range of Macquarie dictionaries. Since then Style Councils have become annual events, held in different capital cities, and still convened by the Dictionary Research Centre. Characteristically the convenors call together a large group of writers, publishers, editors, teachers, lawyers, technologists, and academics, all known to have interests in themes and topics relating to variation and choice in language, especially written language. The contributed papers deal with aspects of spelling, capitalisation, punctuation, hyphenation etc., but also with wider questions of variation and choice in the lexico-grammatic systems of English, and with more general issues such as style guidance, Plain English, language and the law, language and computing, language in mass communication, in education, and in various other professional practices. Characteristically surveys are conducted on particular points of usage at each Style Council and the results published in the annual Proceedings. With the support of Language Australia, a national bulletin called Australian Style is published twice yearly by the Dictionary Research Centre, edited by Pam Peters. It disseminates the results of work on Australian English to almost 5,000 regular readers, including English teachers at all levels, editors, computer people and members of the public interested in language. The Style Council Centre is also engaged in a study of Standard English as used in student writing, and is embarking on a survey of the various Aboriginal Englishes, and a project for a database inventory of differences between Australian, British and American English, as a reference tool for those needing to write and publish using the variety appropriate to particular circumstances. The Australianness of Australian English is, of course, a highly variable factor. It is most obvious in spoken language, especially among speakers at the broader end of the speech spectrum. But in written language it depends more on register and subject matter: the closer one comes to the personal and social heart of Australian life the more idiomatic and indigenised is the language in use. The Australianness of Australian literature, especially in dialogue in drama and other fiction holding up the mirror to the intimacies of Australian life, is at one extreme, and close by are the columns of (especially) the week-end newspapers. There is a gradient then towards the other end, where one finds expository or business writing in prose. This is where one might expect writers to make their language choices constantly from within the limits of Standard Australian English as it is progressively defined and re-defined by those who take on the task of so defining it. Australia is very fortunate in that, throughout its history, its English has never been substantially affected internally by a major influence from any other languages. The external influences have derived initially from our inheritance of a British-type education system, and subsequently from the mass-communication dominance of American English. Australians have not succumbed uniformly or even happily to either influence in any marked way. Nevertheless in competently written Australian expository prose the style choices available are quite similar to those offered in British grammars or in, say, the Chicago Style Manual. There may be a noticeable element of informality in some Australian expository writing, even occasionally a deliberate lapse into coarseness. But
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the only real source of unintelligibility for those unfamiliar with the variety is when a word fully current in world English is used in a specifically or typically Australian sense (for example, the word elitism can have, and does often have, a derogatory sense in an Australian context, whereas no British or American dictionaries appear to recognise that in their definitions of the word). Actual Australianisms (like Mabo, koori, leschenaultia, wowser) belong to the subject matter of the discourse, and are no different from the -isms of other varieties of English.

STYLE GUIDANCE

Many Australian organisations provide their members or employees with an in-house style guide. Since 1966 the Commonwealth of Australia itself has published its now frequently revised Style Manual for authors, editors and printers. In recent years various commercial publishers have published substantial guides by competent and attractive writers, all of them (except the latest one) owing much in style and content to Fowler's model. The newcomer is The Cambridge Australian English Style Guide (Peters, 1995). This volume of some 850 pages breaks new ground by adopting a descriptive approach based on the methods of corpus linguistics, in which the facts of actual usage, assembled in computerised databases, are the source of balanced guidance that owes nothing to personal opinion. On any point involving choice the reader is first given the facts about a particular variant usage, then taken through the events that produced the variant, so that in the end the reader may decide which of the possible choices is best for the work in hand. The principal database used is Australian in origin, but constant reference is made to the database corpus records of British and American English. This important work makes a welcome addition to the documentation of Australian English, and a strong contribution to the on-going definition and re-definition of its standards.

NOTES
1. The following account draws on an unpublished book of press cuttings compiled at the time by Professor A. G. Mitchell, who was the most prominent figure in a public newspaper debate on the emerging concept of English in Australia as Australian English. 2. Selected Monographs: Baker, Sidney J. (1945) The Australian Language, 2nd edn. 1966. Sydney: Currawong. Mitchell, Alexander G. (1946) The Pronunciation of English in Australia. Sydney: Angus & Robertson. Mitchell, Alexander G. and Delbridge, Arthur (1965) The Speech of Australian Adolescents. Sydney: Angus & Robertson. Ramson, William S. (1966) Australian English. An historical study of the vocabulary, 17981898. Canberra: ANU Press. Turner, George W. (1992) English in Australia. In The Cambridge History of the English Language. Edited by Richard M. Hogg. Vol. 5, English in Britain and Overseas: origins and development. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hammarstrom, U. G. E. (1980) Australian English: Its origin and status. Forum Phoneticum 19. Hamburg: Helmut Buske. Horvath, Barbara (1985) Variation in Australian English: The sociolects of Sydney. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Clyne, Michael G. (1991) Community Languages: The Australian experience. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Collins, Peter and Blair, David (eds) (1989) Australian English: The Language of a New Society. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press. Ozolins, Uldis (1993) The Politics of Language in Australia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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Baker, Sidney J. (1945) The Australian Language. Sydney: Angus & Robertson. Bianco, Joseph Lo (1987) National Policy on Languages. Canberra: Australian Government Publishing Services. Bianco, Joseph Lo (1990) A Hard-nosed Multiculturalism: Revitalising Multicultural Education? In Vox: The Journal of the Australian Advisory Council on Languages and Multicultural Education. 4. Canberra: Department of Employment, Education and Training. Bianco, Joseph Lo (1994) English in a Multilingual Australia and a Multilingual World. In The National Language; Proceedings of Style Council 94. Edited by Pamela H. Peters, Dictionary Research Centre, Macquarie University. Delbridge, Arthur (editor-in-chief ) (1981, 1991, 1997) The Macquarie Dictionary. Sydney: Macquarie Library Pty Ltd. Department of Employment, Education and Training (1991) The Language of Australia Discussion Paper on an Australian Literacy and Language Policy for the 1990s. Vol. 1. Canberra: Australian Government Publishing Service. Downing, W. H. (1919) Digger Dialects, Melbourne: Lothian Book Publishing. Hughes, Joan (1993) The Concise Australian National Dictionary. Melbourne: Oxford University Press. Johnston, Grahame K. (1976) The Australian Pocket Oxford Dictionary. Melbourne: Oxford University Press. Jones, Daniel (1917) English Pronouncing Dictionary. London: J. M. Dent. Lake, Joshua (1898) A Dictionary of Australian Words, The Australasian Supplement to Webster's International Dictionary. Merriam. Lentzner, Karl (1891) A Glossary of Australian, Anglo-Indian, Pidgin English, West Indian, and South African Words. London: Kegan Paul. McArthur, Tom (1992) The Oxford Companion to the English Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press. McArthur, Tom (1996) Third in the pecking order. English Today, 12(1). McBurney, Samuel (1889) Colonial Pronunciation. In Early English Pronunciation. Edited by Alexander J. Ellis. Early English Text Society, Vol. 5. pp. 23648. Meredith, Mrs Charles (1844) Notes and Sketches of New South Wales, During a Residence in that Colony from 1838 to 1844. London: John Murray, p. 50. Mitchell, Alexander G. (1940) The Pronunciation of English in Australia, a lecture privately printed for members of the Australian English Association. Mitchell, Alexander G. (1965) The English Language in Australia. In An Introduction to Australian Literature. Edited by C. D. Narasimhaiah. Brisbane: Jacaranda Press. Mitchell, Alexander G. and Delbridge, Arthur (1965) The Speech of Australian Adolescents, A Survey. Sydney: Angus & Robertson. Morris, Edward E. (1972) Austral English: A Dictionary of Australasian Words Phrases and Usages. London: Macmillan and Sydney: Sydney University Press. Peters, Pam (1995) The Cambridge Australian English Style Guide. Melbourne: Cambridge University Press. Ramson, William S. (1988) The Australian National Dictionary: A Dictionary of Australianisms on Historical Principles. Melbourne: Oxford University Press. Vaux, James H. (1819, 1964) A New and Comprehensive Vocabulary of the Flash Language. In The Memoirs of James Hardy Vaux. Edited by N. McLachlan. London: Heinemann. Wilkes, Gerald A. (1978, 1996) A Dictionary of Australian Colloquialisms. Sydney: Sydney University Press.

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