English Transported ESSAYS ON AUSTRALASIAN ENGLISH Edited by W. S. Ramson $3.95 This book was published by ANU Press between 1965–1991. This republication is part of the digitisation project being carried out by Scholarly Information Services/Library and ANU Press. This project aims to make past scholarly works published by The Australian National University available to a global audience under its open-access policy. ENGLISH TRANSPORTED PLEASE RETURN TO :• editorial department 2 , m W7° UNIVERSITY ENGLISH TRANSPORTED Essays on Australasian English edited by W.S. RAMSON AUSTRALIAN NATIONAL UNIVERSITY PRESS CANBERRA 1970 © William Stanley Ramson This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of private study, research, criticism, or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Inquiries should be made to the publisher. Printed and manufactured in Australia Registered in Australia for transmission by post as a book National Library of Australia card no. & ISBN— 0 7081 0626 9 (clothbound) 0 7081 0631 5 (paperbound) Library of Congress Catalog card no. 72-113946 PREFACE ‘Australasian’ is a little-used word for a concept repudiated in most senses except the geographical, and it may rightly be asked if its use in the sub-title of a collection of readings such as this does not impose an artificial unity on the contents. Words like ‘Austral’ (chosen by Morris for the title of his dictionary in 1898), ‘Antipodean’, or ‘Anzac’, each with connotations inappropriate to this context, certainly would suggest such a unity: the use of a geographical name, neutral in the social connotations, tolerates both the similarities and the differences between the English of Australia and that of New Zealand, and affirms the logic of studying the two together. And such a study is logical. Both countries were settled at roughly the same time; both drew, if not on the same social balance, at least on the same population source. Both presented their English-speaking settlers with new environments and different occupational techniques. Both re­ quired, as their separate societies emerged, substantially new dialects of English, which in each case reflected a new and individual social balance and coped with new demands. If the Australian and New Zealand dialects had developed in isolation from each other, their common origin and length of life would have made an integrated study useful. As it is, the contacts between the two countries have been so close that it is doubtful if one dialect can be fully recorded without prior or concurrent knowledge of the other. Both the similarities and the differences are illuminating: conclusions which can already be drawn about one suggest approaches to the other; patterns emerge which may or may not be repeated; individual features gain or lose importance as their uniqueness is confirmed or denied. ‘Australasian’ covers, of course, more than these two countries, and, once a start has been made on the recording of Australian English and New Zealand English, there is a case to be made for recording, and examining in relation to these two major dialects in the region, the English of Papua-New Guinea, Norfolk Island, and those Pacific islands which have, during their short history of European settlement, been in close touch with Australia and New Zealand. Each of these potential dialect areas demands its own investigation, but each is illuminated if the major interdependent dialects of the region and their subsidiaries are studied together. v vi Preface This collection assumes the value of such an integrated regional approach but provides, as a cursory glance will show, only an uneven coverage. The bulk of the papers are on aspects of Australian English, two are on New Zealand English, and one on the pidgin used in Papua- New Guinea. Though this balance may seem to argue that Australian English is the major dialect in the region, it is in fact no more than a reflection of the present state of studies.1 Some aspects of Australian English have been fairly fully recorded; the corresponding aspects of New Zealand English have not. Some attention has been given to Norfolk Island English, but it is only recently that a beginning has been made in describing that of Papua-New Guinea. Not the least of this collection’s aims is to draw attention to the neglected areas. Within Australia there is some reason for optimism. Two research centres, the Australian Language Research Centre in the University of Sydney, and the Queensland Speech Survey, have already accumulated valuable data, and the Australian Academy of the Humanities has recently announced its support for an historical dictionary of Australian English. Also cheering is the fact that the contributors to this collection are drawn from a number of Australian universities, an earnest of the extent to which the work is being pushed forward on several fronts. It is a reason­ able assumption that the new universities in Papua-New Guinea and Fiji will bring the English of those countries under scrutiny. But the situation in New Zealand is far from encouraging; both the papers on New Zealand English in this collection were written by expatriates, and, outside Auck­ land and Victoria, the subject is receiving little attention. The need, there as here, is for a properly supported historical project on which subsequent specific studies can be based. Two of the papers in this collection are in the nature of pioneer studies. J. A. W. Bennett’s paper on New Zealand English was written while he was on service during the war and published in American Speech in 1943. As late as 1966 it remained, as G. W. Turner remarked in The English Language in Australia and New Zealand, ‘the best survey of New Zealand English’.2 A. G. Mitchell’s Australian Humanities Research Council Address of 1960 was delivered some fifteen years after the publication of his Pronunciation of English in Australia, and reported in part on the preliminary findings of the Mitchell-Delbridge speech survey. For much of his period as McCaughie Professor of English in the University of Sydney Mitchell was Australian English’s only advocate, and the address has 1 See my ‘Australian and New Zealand English: The Present State of Studies’, Kivung, Vol. 2, No. 1, 1969, pp. 42-56. 2 P. 217. My title, English Transported, is borrowed from Turner, this being the title of his first chapter. Preface vii historical value as a statement of an approach which has stimulated and guided later students of both the vocabulary and the pronunciation. The papers which follow these, Turner’s on New Zealand English, and Delbridge’s, Gunn’s, and my own on Australian English, are intended to provide a more complete picture than either of the early papers was able to do. Drawing on information assembled in the last decade, they follow through tendencies which Bennett and Mitchell suggested, establish more clearly the main lines of development, and serve both to indicate the areas in which research is continuing and the areas in which further research should be encouraged. In both Australia and New Zealand the English language has come into contact with the languages of indigenous peoples, the Aborigines and the Maoris, and the languages of immigrant European minorities. In both cases the direct effect has been small; lexical borrowings from the Maori and Aboriginal languages have occurred in specific areas, and some account of these is given in Turner’s paper and my own. But forms of English have developed in these contact situations which have only recently come under examination. Clyne’s paper reports on studies of the speech of European migrants in Australia, and Dutton’s, based on work com­ pleted as part of the Queensland Speech Survey, on the English used by the Aborigines in one part of Australia. Less has been done on the latter than on the former, but both serve not only as reports on work in progress but as models for further studies. Susan Kaldor’s paper examines specifi­ cally the language difficulties met by Asian students in Australia: the problem is a recent one, and her findings are of relevance in both Australia and New Zealand. A similar but more complex situation arises in Papua-New Guinea. Here the ‘English transported’ is Australian English. A study of the emerg­ ing New Guinea English is at present being undertaken at the University of Papua and New Guinea, but the region’s major contribution to the language complex of Australasia is the variety of pidgin English which Laycock describes in this volume. The two remaining papers are those of Flint and Johnston. As Director of the Queensland Speech Survey Flint has initiated a series of research projects on the varieties of English used in parts of Queensland, and his paper is a demonstration, using passages of written and spoken English, of the techniques of linguistic description which he has evolved. Johnston’s paper deals with a different subject altogether, that is, with the use of language in literature, and his concern is with relating the emergence of a new dialect to the contemporaneous emergence of a new literature, with establishing the relevance of linguistic studies of Australian English to the use of a distinctively Australian ‘voice’ in Australian literature. viii Preface David Blair’s bibliography, which supersedes earlier bibliographies of Australian English, is the fullest available record of the main areas of activity. Such a collection cannot be read as providing any sort of final statement on the use of English in Australasia. It is our hope that there is sufficient material not otherwise readily accessible assembled here for the book to be used in university and college courses, and for it to be of real interest to those working in related fields and to the general reader.