LL-L: "Language varieties" LOWLANDS-L, 25.FEB.2000 (06) [E]

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 L O W L A N D S - L * 25.FEB.2000 (06) * ISSN 189-5582 * LCSN 96-4226
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From: G Halliday [G.Halliday at xtra.co.nz]
Subject: Australian English

> > BTW, Ron, can you tell me if there are regional varieties ('accents')
> > in Australia like there are in the USA. That is, can one tell if X is
from
> > Melboure and Y is from Brisbane?
>
> Bob, I really can't tell any regional differences, only social differences
> (i.e., educational, or city vs country), even though many who lived in
> Australia longer than I did told me that they *can* tell for instance
> Sydneysiders or Melbournians by the way they talk.  I'm not so sure if
that's
> a matter of phonology and/or lexicon or just personal demeanor.  Perhaps
we
> should pass this question on to those who are more knowledgeable about
this
> than I am.
>
> Regards,
>
> Reinhard/Ron

Research on Australian English seems to have been moving from a routine
denial of any great variation to describing some of the variation that
Australians themselves routinely affirm even if they can't pin it down to
any great extent - the same seems to be the case in New Zealand where more
work has been done in the last decade that on Aus.Eng.

There is a reasonable amount of regional variation in Australian English but
little compared with other English speaking countries except NZ. In 1989 the
Australian Journal of Linguistics devoted a volume to A.Eng. which had an
excellent article by Pauline Bryant on variation in lexis in the South-East
with about 20 maps, and vocabulary differences are often well-known.
Phonology is harder to pin down but there do seem to be some obvious
differences such as the distribution of the type of vowel in words such as
dance and variation in use of High Terminal Rise. These are frequency
matters however and hard to detect. Most of the evidence published relates
to NSW versus Victoria. There also seem to be differences in in overall
voice quality but as Ron has said this is complicated by social variation.
Horvath's work on Sydney, Variation in Autralian English, is a good
introduction to the subtleties of the shifts going on. Since her book their
has been quite a lot of discussion on newer changes in Sydney notably of the
vowel in fish, which is being centralised and is said to be a NZ feature.

An indication of the complexities in these newer forms of English can be
seen in a study (I can't recall the name - I read it about 25 years ago)
that set out to investigate the claim of Melbournites that they could tell
where people came from in their state. Experiments showed that this only
worked in face-to-face settings not with recordings. The researchers
discovered that the variable involved turned out to be lip-spread settings
which varied in concentric circles of about 50 miles radius from the city
centre.

Geordie Halliday

----------

From: R. F. Hahn <sassisch at yahoo.com>
Subject: Language varieties

Thanks a lot for the overview (above), Geordie!  That's really helpful.

I was aware of a fair amount of research in varieties of Australian Aboriginal
English (i.e., indigenous language substrates and pidgin influences).  I am
happy to hear that there are activities in the area of other locally grown
English varieties.

Are you aware of any work being done on English of Western Australia?  I have
been checking out the Centre for Linguistics at the University of Western
Australia (http://www.uwa.edu.au/), but it serves several faculties (= Am.
departments), is dominated by anthrology and thus by Aboriginal linguistics,
and the English department seems heavy on the literature side of things.

I am interested in your remarks about English language diversity in a
relatively small country with relatively recent European presence like
Aotearoa/New Zealand.  I would expect some English speech variation between Te
Ika a Mauri/North Island and Te Waipounamu/South Island, besides social class
variety and Polynesian-influenced English.  Does it go beyond that?  If so,
this sounds like a very interesting case study of more recent dialect
formation in a relatively small island country.

Finally, have you or someone else heard of any dialectal variation in these
two countries where variety-specific features are attributable to local
concentrations of specific European English varieties or other languages, such
as Scottish English and/or Scots features in one area versus, say, Southern
English features in another area?

Thanks again for your help, and don't worry if you don't have the answers to
my questions.

Regards,

Reinhard/Ron

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