The importance of 'elsewhere': Looking beyond London and Ireland in the creation of Australian English

Abstract

Introduction In contrast to the very recent and energetic empirical research activity on the origins of New Zealand English (see, for example, Gordon, Campbell, Hay, Maclagan, Sudbury and Trudgill 2004, Trudgill 2004, Meyerhoff 2006), driven by the discovery of early recordings that, it is argued, can shed light on the formative period of this variety of English, research on the origins of Australian English have been much less vigorous (though see Trudgill and Gordon 2006). Consequently, although paying passing reference to some of the earlier theoretical products of research on the formation of post-colonial varieties of English such as Trudgill’s proposals on dialect contact (e.g. 1986), there has been little attempt as yet to fully engage with the outputs of the more recent New Zealand work in the analysis of Australian English. As a result, much of the writing on the origins of this latter variety is monogenetic, arguing for a single geographical origin for each feature of the variety. Dominating this work is the claim that Australian English originates from some form of London English.

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