Introduction

In this chapter I will present evidence to show that there is little difference between secondary-school children from various social backgrounds in England and Australia in terms of access to high status and specialist lexes of the language.

The written language of Australia and its specialist oral counterpart has developed in parallel with the written language elsewhere. Turner (1966: 67), for example, writes: ‘the coincidence of English and Australian written idiom is not a natural phenomenon, but is cultivated by literature in its widest sense’. For much of Australia's history, most books and even most magazines encountered by children were written and produced in the United Kingdom. More importantly perhaps, the examples of diction found in those sources were routinely pointed to as exemplars of ‘good English’ to be adopted in schools and in later life. Increasingly too in the twentieth century, Australian English made contact with other branches of English. Ramson (1972: 44) points to the lexicon of the scientist as the greatest single influence on the vocabulary of English: ‘And it matters little whether the scientist is English, American or Australian. The specialist vocabulary of his particular branch of scientific enquiry acknowledges not regional but professional boundaries.’