Lexical and

Morphosyntactic
Variation in
Australian English
by Lee Murray and Howard Manns

Presented by
SWEET JUSTINE A QUIJANO
MA in English
 INTRODUCTION
DIFFERENTIATION PHASE: AUSTRALIA'S RECENT ENTRY:
This phase in English dialect evolution Compared to American English
signifies a stronger sense of political, (entered in 1898), Australia is a
cultural, and linguistic independence. newcomer to this phase, having
It allows for regional and social entered only decades ago.
diversification of dialects.

PRE-DIFFERENTIATION VARIATION: LIMITED EARLY RESEARCH:

Social and regional variations existed • Early studies found little regional
before, but they were less prominent. variation in morphosyntactic
• Raw materials for such variations features and made only general
existed due to contact with comments on social variation.
indigenous languages and • Early research on regional lexicon
immigration waves. relied on anecdotal evidence for
• Regional phonological variation vocabulary differences across
has been documented. states.
Lexical Variation
within Australian
English
Australians in different states or regions
often use different words for the same,
similar or locally relevant referents. This
variation is discussed in earlier accounts of
AusE like Sidney Baker’s (1945) The
Australian Language and W.S. Gunn’s
(1970) Twentieth-Century Australian Idiom.
Baker (1945 :195) notes difficulties in
collecting localised expressions in his
overview of AusE and provides “a selection
of local materials” for the reader.
Examples:

• Rooty Hill – King’s Cross (area known for

street sex work)

• Collins Street twist – an unfinished cigar

or cigarette butt picked up from the street
for smoking
Baker’s (1945 :198) list also highlights the inter-city rivalry between
Sydney and Melbourne and how Sydneysiders boast they are three
hours ahead of Smellburn (our harbour, our bridge and our
Bradman). Later work by Wilkes (1993 :72) suggests Melbournians
mockingly responded by calling the Sydney Harbour Bridge the
coathanger.
Gunn (1970:64) notes, “it is quite
obvious that special naming does
exist in different places”, but “no
scientific work has been done on
this”. This began to change in the
1980s with a series of surveys by
sociolinguists and through the work of
lexicographers developing the
Macquarie Dictionary and The
Australian National Dictionary.
 Sociolinguistic
Studies of Lexical
Variation in
Australian English
Regional lexical variation underwent more
systematic sociolinguistc study from the
1980s. The largest formal study of AusE
lexical variation to date has been
conducted by Pauline Bryant (1985,
1989b , 1989a , 1991 , 1992 ). Bryant saw
two key challenges in understanding
regional variation:

1. mapping the limits of regional

variation

2. what words to include within the

relevant regions
She set out with the intention of drawing isoglosses or heteroglosses to
delineate words and regions. To do so, Bryant conducted oral and
written surveys of approximately 1000 informants throughout Australia
At the outset, she assembled a list of 86 possible words from her own
personal observations in the prior decades but also from the list
suggested by Gunn (1970). The list of lexical variants grew to 696
overall through a search of literature and newspapers, the contributions
of informants and her own personal observations.
Bryant found that some of these words were not regional variants but
rather synonymous within the same region. For instance, Gunn
(1970 :64) notes sweets-pudding-desserts as regional variants in
Australia, whereas Bryant (e.g., 1991 ) finds these used more broadly. In
the end, Bryant found identified four key usage areas for regional words:
In the end, Bryant found identified four key usage areas for regional
words:

1. North-east New South Wales (NSW) and Queensland

2. South-east Victoria, Tasmania, and the Riverina area of

southern NSW

3. South-centre south-east South Australia and neighbouring

parts of NSW

4. South-west south-western Western Australia

Some regions of Australia (e.g. the Northern Territory, much of Western

Australian and much of South Australia) are not represented in the list
due to insufficient data.
Bryant also notes considerable out-of-area
usage of regional terms in Australia. For
instance, if you give someone a ride on
your bicycle handlebars, it is known as a
dink (or dinking ) in the south-east, but a
dinky in most parts of the south-centre.
However, there are also sporadic out-of-
area uses of dink in the south-central
region.
Border areas overlap considerably in the use of one region’s lexical
variant or the other ( Bryant, 1989b ). Mount Gambier is approximately
equal distance from Melbourne and Adelaide. Of the 11 variables that
differ across South Australia and Victoria, Bryant (1989b ) finds that
residents of Mount Gambier use four South Australian words
(slippery dip, gutter, recess, Salvation Jane ), six Victorian words (snib,
mudlark, nature strip, dixie, peanut butter, marrow) and synonymous use
of fritz or German sausage for the remaining referent. Such variation
ultimately made it difficult in many, if not most, instances to draw
isoglosses and heteroglosses in Australia.
Bryant’s work gives us a significant sense of regional variation in the
Australian lexicon. The most frequently cited variable in Bryant’s work
(e.g. 1991 ) relates to the item Australians wear to the beach – a bathing
suit or swimsuit in American English, but togs in Queensland,
swimmers in NSW and bathers in Victoria, Tasmania and West
Australia (but see recent crowdsourced work by Billington et al., 2015 for
intra-regional variation in these terms and others, including cossie,
swimsuit , boardies and budgie smugglers).
Yet, by far the most frequently cited “category” in Bryant’s work related to
food, with 576 mentions. After that, the most commonly mentioned items
were those associated with neighbourhood and home environments. As
noted previously, Bryant found that many of these words were not
regional variants, but rather synonymous within a region. For
instance, pillow case and pillow slip were found to varyingly be used for
the cover one puts on their pillow, and bitumen, asphalt or tar for the
surface of a road (Bryant, 1991).
Synonymous variation was sometimes driven by the formality of the
context (Bryant, 1989b). In NSW and Queensland, garbage bin was a
general word for what we put our rubbish into, but garbo would be used in
informal or intimate contexts. In Victoria, Bryant (1989b) found rubber
band to be a general word, but lacker bands might be used informally.
Bryant’s and other scholars’ works have also highlighted social variation
in the Australian lexicon. For instance, Bryant (1991 ) found a large
vegetable known as a marrow by younger South Australians was called a
trombone by those 45 years old or older. She found that the word servo
for service station was only used by males from eastern states and
raised the question of whether and to what degree such shortenings were
localised and/or gendered.
Holmes, Sigley and Terraschke (2009 ) analysed written and spoken
corpora of American, Australian, British and New Zealand English and
found that AusE speakers used a greater number of words indexing
gender neutrality than speakers of the other Englishes. In other words,
Australians were more likely to use words like chairperson or chair
instead of chairman . Holmes, Sigley and Terraschke posit this may reflect
greater inclusion of women in the Australian workplace and/or
results from a societal push to use more inclusive language.
Lexicographers and
Lexical Variation in
Australian English
• The Macquarie Dictionary (1981) and The Australian National Dictionary
(1988) were published to document Australian English.
• These dictionaries led to further research on regional variation in Australian
English.

Examples of regional variation in Australian English include:

• South Australia: "villa" (large house), "pusher" (stroller)

• Western Australia: "bays" ( 駐 車 区 chūshaku-ku, parking area), "verge"

(roadside), "in good heart" (fertile land)

• Tasmania: "convict brick", "convict building", "fens" (marsh), "highlands"

• Queensland: "humpy" (temporary shelter) borrowed from Yagara language

• Northern Territory: "minga" (ant) used to mean "tourist", "buju" used to mean
"sexually attractive person" borrowed from Arrernte and Larrakia languages

• Migrant groups also influenced regional variation. For example, German

migrants introduced the word "Fritz" for German sausage in South Australia.

• Government impositions also contributed to lexical variation. For instance, the

first year of primary school was called "kindergarten" in NSW, "prep" in
Tasmania and Victoria, and "reception" in South Australia.
• Australians have shared in-jokes using different terms across states.

• Names for an "uncultured, unsophisticated" person: "bogan" (nationally

known), "bevan" (Queensland), "westie" (Sydney and Melbourne), "chigga"
(Tasmania), "booner" (Canberra)

• Names for large cars/SUVs driven by wealthy people: "Toorak tractor"

(Victoria), "Kenmore tractor" (Queensland), "North Shore tractor" (NSW),
"Double Bay shopping trolley" (NSW), "Mosman shopping trolley" (NSW)

• Names for cask or box wine: "Dapto briefcase" (NSW), "Broadmeadows

briefcase" (Victoria), "Coraki handbag" (NSW), "Balga handbag" (Western
Australia)
Morphosyntactic
Variation in
Australian English
• There have been two primary ways of
investigating AusE morphosyntax:
survey/elicitation and the study of
corpora (Collins & Peters ,2008).
• Age and social factors emerge as the
most powerful influence on morphosyntactic
variation (Peters, 2014).
• Earlier work, such as that by Pawley (2004,
2008), often considers AusE in terms of the
degree to which its morphosyntactic
features are “vernacular”, “colloquial” or
“formal”.
 Nonstandard features and Australian English
Many earlier works on AusE (e.g. Eagleson, 1972 , 1976;
Pawley, 2004 , 2008) considered the degree to which its
features might be considered in terms of labels like
“vernacular”, “colloquial” or “standard/formal” (echoing work
by Labov,1972).

• Standard Australian Formal English

(StAusFE) - most formal, close to British
and North American Englishes
• Standard Australian Colloquial English
(StAusColE) - dominant variety, used by
middle-class Australians
• Australian Vernacular English (AusVE) -
least formal, linked to informal speech of
working-class/rural men
(1) Never as a past negator (e.g. he
never did it meaning “he didn’t do it”)

(2) Adjective/adverb merger (e.g.

quick, good, nice as adverbs)

(3) Special forms or phrases for

second-person pronouns (e.g. youse ,
yiz)

(4) Merger of simple past/present

perfect (e.g. I only been there once)

(5) were subject-verb agreement (e.g.

They was )
Pawley (2008 , 2016) discusses how and why AusE speakers use
grammatically gendered pronouns for inanimate objects and animals
(of which the sex might not be known). For instance:

(6) What we’ll be looking for is a tree with a straight barrel on ‘im.

(7) That river , she is dangerous with all them crocodiles .

(8) That timber gun, she splits the log open .

Social Variation of Morphosyntactic Features in Australian English

The work by Eisikovits (1987, 1989a,1989b,

1991) and Shnukal (1978, 1989) has revealed
age- and gender-related variation among
young people in Sydney and Cessnock,
NSW, respectively. For instance, for some
speakers of AusE, don’t is invariant across
third-person singular contexts:

Example:

Mum don’t have to do nothing.

FINDINGS

Eisikovits (1989a ) found adolescent boys in Sydney were more

likely to use this variant than adolescent girls. Moreover, results
suggest adolescent boys increasingly used this form as they got
older. Boys studying in year 8 used 13/78 tokens of invariant don’t
(16.7%), whereas year 10 boys used 31/60 tokens (51.7%).
Adolescent girls stayed consistent in their relative non-use of
invariant don’t across age groups.
Social Variation of Morphosyntactic Features in Australian English

The use of past participle for past tense

also emerged as statistically relevant in
Eisikovitz’s work:

Example:

He woke up and seen something.

FINDINGS

Eisikovits (1989a ) found that adolescent girls in year 8 used this

feature at a greater rate (134/313, 42.8%) than adolescent boys
(139/481, 28.9%). However, adolescent girls seemingly reduce their
use of this variant as they get older (86/307, 28%), and boys
increase their use of this feature (137/411, 33.3%).
While perhaps the gender dimension
requires further work in AusE, age-related
variation emerges as “the dominant factor”
in studies of morphosyntactic variation in
Australia ( Peters, 2014).
FINDINGS
• Younger Australians tend to use fewer verb conjugations than
older generations.
• Younger Australians prefer regular verb forms (e.g., shrunk) for
irregular verbs (e.g., shrank).

• Younger Australians favor the historical present tense (using

present tense for past events) in storytelling.

Example:
And then one day I heard someone knock on my door and she’s
just like standing there with this bird in her hand . . .
Rodríguez Louro and Ritz (2014 ) compare the use of the simple past
tense, the historical present and the present perfect in narratives. They
find a significant relationship between age and tense/aspect choice;
speakers aged 36–62 favour the simple past, while those aged 12–28
favour the historical present with quotative verbs. The narrative present
perfect has a similar function to the historical present:

Examples:

So she’s come in, and she’s gone, “Oh I need to fill out this form . . .”

So I’ve – I’ve took Tim down the back .

Richard and Rodríguez Louro (2016 ) find three types of speakers more
likely to use the narrative present perfect: nonprofessionals, males and
older people. In other words, age matters, as mentioned, but other social
factors emerge as relevant to morphosyntactic variation, and this
offers exciting possibilities for future work on AusE.
SUMMARY

This chapter explores lexical and morphosyntactic variation in Australian English

(AusE).

Lexical variation:

• Regional vocabulary reflects the history and identity of each state.

• Australia is progressive in using gender-neutral language.

Morphosyntactic variation:

• Early studies focused on formality levels (vernacular, colloquial, formal).

• Age is a key factor in morphosyntactic variation.
• Younger people's language use can influence future changes in AusE.
• Age interacts with other social factors like gender, location and social class.

The study of variation in AusE is a growing field with exciting possibilities.

 Thank you
for listening!