Strine

(strīn)
n. Informal
Australian English.

[After the Australian English pronunciation of AUSTRALIAN.]

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Is a term used to describe the form of English spoken and written in Australia. Like other national varieties of English, it shares much of its vocabulary and pronunciation with the parent form, but historical, social and environmental factors mean that it has developed distinctive features of its own. This distinctive component of the English spoken and written in Australia has itself been called Australian English or something similar, as in E.E. Morris's dictionary, Austral English (1898), and W.S. Ramson's Australian English. An Historical Study of the Vocabulary 1788/1898 (1966) where it is suggested that 'For all practical purposes, Australian English consists of the additions to British English'. The narrower usage has declined somewhat, however, and in reference to the vocabulary of Australian English it is now as common to use terms like 'Australianisms' to describe the distinctively Australian component of the lexicon; 'Australianism' was used in this way at least as far back as the 1890s. The spoken English of Australians is referred to by a variety of terms, including Australian pronunciation, Australian speech, the Australian accent and spoken Australian English.

English began to be established in Australia with the arrival of the First Fleet in 1788. Because of the penal nature of the original British settlement, there existed initially a distinction between the language of the military administrators - what Ramson has called 'polite English' - and the more 'vulgar' language of convicts, e.g. the thieves' slang of James Hardy Vaux, and the language of some early immigrants. It was from the latter linguistic group, and well before the end of transportation, that a new speech developed among the Australians born and raised in the colonies, a speech still noted for its homogeneity; in other words, although there is a range of pronunciation in Australia, it is determined by social rather than regional factors. The 'mixing-bowl' theory advanced by A.G. Mitchell, J.R.L. Bernard and some others to account for the evolution of Australian speech has three main ingredients. First, because the earliest settlers came from all parts of Britain, a distinctive speech evolved, initially among colonial children, from the mixture of dialects spoken, with London English the most important influence. Second, the urban origins of a significant proportion of the settlers, together with the fact that they were overwhelmingly British, were factors in the standardisation of the new speech. Third, regional homogeneity is explained by the recreation of the new speech again and again in 'germinal centres' of the colonies (i.e. in different parts of the colonies, as settlement spread).

That the first distinctively Australian speech derived from the convicts and other humble settlers means that from the outset Australian speech bore, in Bernard's words, a 'halo of attributes which necessarily alienated it from many ... other speakers of English'. Thus from the 1820s until recently Australian English has been criticised both inside the country (notably among educated Australians adopting as their model, standard English, what is called 'Received Pronunciation' or 'RP') and outside it (notably among RP speakers in England). In 1946 A.G. Mitchell listed as the commonest criticisms that Australian speech was ugly, lazy, slovenly, nasal, drawling, unclear, Cockney, monotonous and flat. Some of the criticisms can be linked with differences between Australian speech and other forms of spoken English - the notion of flatness, for example, derives from the fact that the tonal range of Australian speech is smaller than that of RP - but others (for example, nasality) have no basis in fact; and even the assimilations and elisions which characterise 'Strine' are commonly found in other varieties of English. Fundamentally, spoken Australian English is no worse or no better than other varieties, and the criticisms made of it are substantially value judgements based on taste and association.

Nevertheless, Bernard has suggested that some speakers of Australian English have felt the need to upgrade their speech, and that this is one reason for the evolution of what is recognised as three main styles or types of pronunciation: Broad Australian (the form closest to the distinctive Australian speech which emerged early in the nineteenth century, and the one most commentators have in mind when they are critical of Australian speech); Cultivated Australian (a minority form, the prestige dialect in the minds of its speakers, valued as closer to the prestige dialects of England and the USA and that followed by some broadcasters); and General Australian (the form, spoken by the majority of Australians, which lies between Broad and Cultivated). These varieties share distinctive phonetic and prosodic characteristics but exist on a spectrum, with Cultivated Australian closest to RP and Broad Australian furthest away; Australian speakers have the capacity to use sounds from across the spectrum and to move between categories. It follows that the distinctive features of Australian English are to be found most clearly within the Broad Australian. In general, and in comparison with RP, spoken Australian English is narrower in tonal range, and slower in rhythm because of a more even stress pattern, e.g. Australians give more equal weight to their vowels in 'Sunday' than other English speakers. Speech at the Broad Australian end of the spectrum also tends to be marked by assimilation and elision. Apart from these prosodic features, the major differences occur in the vowels and diphthongs: Australian vowels are closer, i.e. made with higher tongue positions, and some are more frontal, i.e. made more towards the front of the mouth. As well as these phonetic differences between Australian English and RP in the quality of what is essentially the same sound, some Australian English vowels and diphthongs are pronounced in such a way that they move towards (and for some Broad Australian speakers become) other sounds - or at least are heard as other sounds by other English speakers, hence the numerous stories of Englishmen hearing 'mite' when an Australian has said 'mate'. Among other noticeable features, there is a greater use of the indeterminate or neutral vowel in Australian English than in other varieties; many speakers of Australian English choose quite different vowels or diphthongs from RP speakers in pronouncing words like 'chance'; and Australians make greater use of truncated forms, e.g. 'footy', 'schoolie'.

Like Australian speech, the vocabulary of Australian English is noted for its homogeneity, despite the kind of regional variety that makes it difficult for a New South Welshman when he asks for 'scallops' instead of 'potato cakes' in Melbourne, or for a 'schooner' instead of a 'pint' of beer in Adelaide. That Australians until recently have overwhelmingly used British or American dictionaries is a measure of the extent to which Australian English shares its vocabulary with the parent form and with other national varieties; yet there have been significant additions to British English, particularly in colloquial usage and occupational vocabularies (e.g. shearing) which derive from the unique history of Australia and from other factors. Four historical periods have been identified in the development of the lexicon of Australian English: the colonial period from 1788 to about 1850 (i.e. the end of transportation and the beginning of the gold rushes, when the first settlers were responding to their new environment); the gold-rush period, which is characterised by more diverse immigration which had a consequential effect on the expansion of the vocabulary (for example, in increasing influence from America); the nationalist period from the 1890s until after the First World War, when journals like the Bulletin fostered a sense of national identity and some of its most popular writers (e.g. Henry Lawson, 'Steele Rudd') extensively employed Australian idioms; and the modern period, particularly since the Second World War, in which developments in communications have been significant in bringing Australian English closer to other national varieties, at the same time as playwrights such as Jack Hibberd and satirists such as Barry Humphries have exploited the potential of indigenous idiom. Within and sometimes straddling these chronological boundaries, significant influences on the development of Australian idiom include the convict system, the rural character of nineteenth-century Australia, the war experiences of Australians, and the importance of sport and other leisure activities. In general Australianisms have been created in three main ways: by borrowing from Aboriginal, Australian pidgin, other languages and other national varieties of English (e.g. 'cooee', 'bush', 'squatter', qq.v.); by the extensions and new meanings given to existing English words (e.g. 'wattle', q.v., and the compounds deriving from 'stock'); and by the survival of words, notably slang and dialect words (e.g. 'bowyang', 'larrikin', 'billy', qq.v.), which have had a longer life or more general use in Australia, sometimes to such an extent that they are popularly thought to be Australian creations. The last two processes often overlap.

Throughout the nineteenth century, numerous comments on colonial idiom and pronunciation were made by government officials, visitors and travellers, explorers, newly-arrived settlers and established residents: for example (among many who could be cited), James Backhouse, David Collins, Peter Cunningham, Barron Field, Friedrich Gerstaecker, Richard and William Howitt, David McKenzie, John MacGillivray, Louisa Anne Meredith, T.L. Mitchell, Samuel Mossman, G.C. Mundy, Charles Rudston Read and Alexander Tolmer. The published writings of these observers have been major sources, along with unpublished journals and diaries, contemporary newspapers and the work of early creative writers such as Alexander Harris, for later historians and lexicographers of Australian English. At the end of the century, at a time of increased national awareness, the first studies of Australian pronunciation and the first word lists, glossaries and dictionaries of Australianisms began to appear. The first detailed account of Australasian pronunciation was by Samuel McBurney, a Glasgowborn principal of a Geelong ladies' college who in 1887 travelled extensively in eastern Australia and NZ examining singers in schools; he made extensive notes as he went on his examinees' pronunciation of sample words, and his observations form the basis of the analysis of Australasian pronunciation included in A.J. Ellis's On Early English Pronunciation (1887). In the same period were published the anonymous Sydney Slang Dictionary (?1882), the German scholar Karl Lentzner's Dictionary of the Slang-English of Australia and of Some Mixed Languages (1892), based partly on residence in Australia, and Cornelius Crowe's The Australian Slang Dictionary (1895).

These dictionaries are all limited in coverage and reliability, including words that did not have either a currency or a distinctive usage in Australia. Nonetheless, they attest to an interest in collecting Australian idioms, particularly informal idioms, which has continued to the present day; the most important collector until recent times is Sidney Baker, whose The Australian Language (1945) and other publications remain indispensable reference tools. Apart from his work, there have been many twentieth-century vocabularies and dictionaries, even leaving aside the glossaries of slang and colloquial terms included in dictionaries of folklore, e.g. by Bill Wannan, or literary works which extensively employ Australian popular idiom, from C.J. Dennis's The Songs of a Sentimental Bloke (1915) to Hibberd's A Stretch of the Imagination (1973). The most important dictionary of informal usage is G.A. Wilkes's scholarly A Dictionary of Australian Colloquialisms (1978, revised 1985 and 1990), a historical dictionary which supplies illustrative quotations taken mainly from printed sources; others include Baker's A Popular Dictionary of Australian Slang (1941) and The Barracker's Bible (1983) by Jack Hibberd and Garrie Hutchinson, a witty treatment of Australian sporting slang. A second group of works either combines commentary and glossary, e.g. Baker's The Drum: Australian Character and Slang (1959), or remains focused on Australian slang and colloquial usage without including any consolidated word list, e.g. Bill Hornadge's The Australian Slanguage (1980) and Nancy Keesing's Lily on the Dustbin: Slang of Australian Women and Families (1982). These popular publications are all mainly confined to the distinctively Australian informal part of Australian English, the Australianisms; even the Wilkes Dictionary of Australian Colloquialisms, by far the most important of those listed, has been renamed a Dictionary of Colloquial Australianisms by one of its reviewers. Another group of vocabularies and dictionaries, however, incorporates Australian slang within a wide lexical context. W.H. Downing's Digger Dialects (1919, updated in 1990 by the Australian National Dictionary Centre), the first record of Australian service slang, includes words current elsewhere in English, and Australian material is incorporated, with Baker as a major source, in the several slang dictionaries of Eric Partridge, notably Slang To-Day and Yesterday (1933, 4th edn 1970), A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English (1937, 7th edn 1970), and A Dictionary of the Underworld (1950, 3rd edn 1968) and Gary Simes's more specific A Dictionary of Australian Underworld Slang (1993). The most important early contribution to the lexicography of Australian English, however, was a work which has been criticised for its scant treatment of colloquial vocabulary: Austral English: A Dictionary of Australasian Words, Phrases and Usages (1898, reprinted 1968, 1971, 1972), by E.E. Morris, an Indian-born Englishman who came to Australia in 1875 to take up a Melbourne headmastership and was appointed professor of English, French and German in 1883. Begun as a by-product of work for the Oxford English Dictionary, Austral English is strongest in its coverage of Aboriginal, Maori and scientific words, particularly in the attention given to flora and fauna, and includes quotations which illustrate the history of the words included. As a historical dictionary of Australianisms it was complemented by the Wilkes dictionary and ultimately replaced by the Australian National Dictionary (see Australian National Dictionary Centre) prepared by a team of lexicographers at the Australian National University under the direction of W.S. Ramson and published in 1988, the bicentenary of English settlement in Australia. The Australian National Dictionary is the first comprehensive, historically based record of the 10 000 words which make up the Australian contribution to the English language. The preparation of the Australian National Dictionary benefited not only from the attention paid by Baker, Wilkes and others to informal Australian English, but also from a range of other research: more broadly based studies of Australian vocabulary, research into specialist vocabularies and studies of other aspects of Australian English (e.g. phonetics). Historically (before the establishment of the Australian National Dictionary Centre in Canberra), the most important centre for research was the University of Sydney where A.G. Mitchell was both student and professor of English; among his several publications was The Pronunciation of English in Australia (1946) the first systematic account of Australian pronunciation. Among later students were Arthur Delbridge, J.R.L. Bernard, R.D. Eagleson, J.S. Gunn, and Ramson, all of whom have made significant contributions to knowledge about Australian English phonetics and lexicography; all were on the staff and part of the Australian Language Research Centre of the university but several have furthered Australian English research at other institutions, e.g. Delbridge and Bernard at Macquarie University, Ramson at the ANU. The 1960s saw several important studies: Ramson's Australian English; revised editions of Baker's The Australian Language (1966) and Mitchell's The Pronunciation of English in Australia (1966, with Delbridge, who earlier collaborated on The Speech of Australian Adolescents 1965); The English Language in Australia and New Zealand (1966) by G.W. Turner, who like several other scholars of Australian English (Ramson, Baker, Grahame Johnston) was originally from NZ; and studies of migrant varieties of Australian English, e.g. Michael Clyne's Transference and Triggering (1967), Aboriginal languages, and Australian place-names.

Research has continued from the 1970s to the 1990s, although the last decade has been probably more notable for the emergence (as well as the dictionaries of Australianisms already mentioned) of general Australian English dictionaries, i.e. dictionaries which give due weighting both to Australianisms and to the standard English basis of Australian English. Before 1976 general dictionaries used in Australia were predominantly English or American ones such as the various Oxford and Webster's, although editions with a supplement of Australasian words were published periodically. The first of these was Joshua Lake's dictionary of Australasian words, published in the Australasian edition of Webster's International Dictionary of the English Language (1898) and also in the separately published The Australasian Supplement to Webster's International Dictionary (1898). Later supplements include Mitchell's 'A Supplement of Australian Words' in a 1952 edition of Chambers' Shorter English Dictionary, R.W. Burchfield's 'A Supplement of Australian and New Zealand Words' in the 1969 edition of The Pocket Oxford Dictionary of Current English, and George Mackaness's 'A Selective Dictionary of Australian & New Zealand Words and Phrases' in several Collins dictionaries, including Collins New English Dictionary (1956), ed. Alexander H. Irvine. Just as Lake's supplement was incorporated into the body of Webster's, so many other general dictionaries without Australian supplements have included Australian words, e.g. the Oxford English Dictionary. Nineteen seventy-six, however, saw the publication of both the Heinemann Australian Dictionary, compiled in conjunction with a team at La Trobe University with all words 'written in standard Australian' but limited in its usefulness and the far more important Australian Pocket Oxford Dictionary. Edited by Grahame Johnston, the Australian Pocket Oxford was based on the 1969 Pocket Oxford Dictionary of Current English, but with each entry 'scrutinized for its application to Australian conditions' it went much further than previous English dictionaries of comparable size in covering Australian vocabulary, idiom and, to a lesser extent, pronunciation. A second edition of the Australian Pocket Oxford by George Turner was published in 1984 and a third edition by Bruce Moore in 1993. In 1979 a new Collins Dictionary of the English Language was published in an 'Australian edition', with introductory material on Australian English by G.A. Wilkes. Although it includes Australian words and usages it is an international dictionary, with an identical word list for the Australian, American, English and other editions; its offshoots, however, the Gem and the Pocket (both 1981 second edition 1992, edited by W.A. Krebs) and the Concise (1982, edited by Krebs and Wilkes) with a second edition in 1992 titled The Collins Concise Dictionary containing a further 15 000 entries on people, places and institutions, are 'Australianised' in a comparable way to the Australian Pocket Oxford. Finally, there is the monumental Macquarie Dictionary (1981, second edition 1992, computerised 1993), prepared at Macquarie University with Arthur Delbridge as editor-in-chief; modified from the Encyclopedic World Dictionary it in turn has been the parent dictionary for the Concise (ed. Delbridge and Bernard), Budget, Pocket (1982, ed. David Blair) and Handy (1983, ed. Ramson). Macquarie The Macquarie Dictionary goes much further than its immediate predecessors in the precedence it gives to Australian pronunciation and definitions. Thus the 'i' and 'y' sounds in 'capacity' are rendered respectively as the neutral vowel and to rhyme with 'sea' in the Macquarie; in the Collins and the Australian Pocket Oxford the international or more standard English 'i' (as in 'sit') is given for both. Similarly, a special Australian usage of a word is given precedence over a special British or American usage, as in 'lay-by' or 'colonial'. Reviews of the Macquarie have welcomed the comprehensiveness of its coverage of Australian idiom and vocabulary, although its dropping of such labels as 'Aust.' means, paradoxically, that its readers have no way of knowing which of its words are Australianisms. Research and publication continue. Stephen Murray-Smith's Right Words: A Guide to English Usage in Australia (1987) contributes to the discussion on the way the English language is used (and misused) in Australia; other works include Exploring Australian English (1987) by Wilkes, Glancing Blows: Life and Language in Australia (1987) by playwright Alex Buzo, and Modern Australian Usage (1993) by Nicholas Hudson. Peter Collins and David Blair edited Australian English: The Language of a New Society (1989), a collection of essays on subjects ranging from vocabulary and syntax to linguistic geography, the history of particular dialects and the origins of the Australian accent. From the Australian National Dictionary Centre came, in 1989, Australian Words and Their Origins, which gives the meanings, origins and pronunciation of those words which were coined in Australia, which have wider currency here than elsewhere or which have special significance in Australian history. The Centre also published in 1992 the Concise version of the 1988 Australian National Dictionary, the Concise edited by Joan Hughes, associate editor of the Centre.

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