Varieties of English, the Dictionary, and the Nation

The relationship between dictionaries and national identity is at its strongest when the regional variety of English they codify has become the speakers’ dictionary of reference. This phenomenon comes with the fourth of five phases in the establishment of new regional varieties of English according to Edgar Schneider’s (2007) evolutionary model, which he calls endonormative stabilization. By phase four, a stable regional variety has crystallised out of the diverse input elements of English (nativization being phase three), and its speakers no longer refer to an external standard for their language norms, as in phase two (exonormative stabilization) and phase three.

These sociolinguistic processes take place over approximately two centuries, as demonstrated in the evolution of American and Australian English. In both, the foundational mix of dialectal English that came with successive waves of British settlers was distilled into a consistent regional variety with which its speakers identified. This they could regard as their own standard language with the publication of a comprehensive national dictionary, such as Noah Webster’s Dictionary of the American Language (1828) in the United States and the Macquarie Dictionary (1981) in Australia. Other dictionaries and glossaries were published in Australia before that, with limited or specialised coverage of the regional lexicon. They nevertheless shed light on facets of regional culture which were or are part of the national matrix.

Australia’s Early Dictionaries

What might be called Australia’s first dictionary was written in the second decade of the nineteenth century, while the practice of transporting English criminals to Australia was in full swing. The convicts’ occupational slang was recorded by James Hardy Vaux in New and Comprehensive Vocabulary of the Flash Language in 1819, a set of more than 700 words and phrases from the ‘cant language used by the family’, the latter defined as ‘thieves, sharpers and all others who get their living upon the cross’. Vaux’s Flash Language vocabulary, compiled to assist the commandant of the penal settlement with the in-language used by the convicts, was arguably the nation’s first specialised dictionary, an account of the occupational jargon of those who still made up a significant proportion of the Australian population after thirty years of settlement. Its focus on convict business makes it a monument to the foundations of Australia as the penal colony Britain needed after the American War of Independence (1775–83) closed those which it had previously maintained in North America. Some of Vaux’s flash terms, like kid (originally ‘a boy thief’) and swag (‘bundle of booty’) have remained as general colloquialisms without pejorative connotations in current Australian English.

During the nineteenth century, the English used in Australia was steadily adapting itself to the local context, applying transported English to a steadily evolving society with increasing numbers of free settlers after 1830, bringing new elements of British English dialects from north to south. It created a melting pot of variable elements which gradually stabilised into a common accent and lexicogrammar. Two late nineteenth-century dictionaries document the growing social and cultural distinctions of the nation, as observed by short- and longer-term visitors. German commentator Karl Lentzer’s Colonial English (1891), subtitled A Glossary of Australian, Anglo-Indian, Pidgin English, West Indian and South African Words, reflects the then-typical view that regional words were marginal elements of common English. His fifty pages of words from Australian and bush slang are documented with relish, and he provides early citations for urban bywords such as brickfielder (‘a dust storm’), rural terms such as rouseabout (‘odd-job man’), and Aboriginal loan words such as bong > bung, meaning ‘dead […]’. Lentzner’s eclectic mix of terms sketches many facets of nineteenth-century life, with individual citations from literary writers as well as contemporary Australian newspapers, of which he writes enthusiastically: ‘if there is one institution of which Australians have reason to be proud, it is their newspapers’. He notes also that ‘the style is purely English, without a touch of Americanism’, in keeping with the view that the wide range of Australian ‘slang’ did not constitute Australian English.

The better-known late nineteenth-century Australian dictionary is that of Edward Morris: Austral English: A Dictionary of Australasian Phrases and Usages (1898). Morris included both Aboriginal–Australian and Maori words, and the ‘commoner scientific words that have had their origin in Australasia’. His dictionary was designed according to the historical principles exemplified in the New English Dictionary (which became known as the Oxford English Dictionary), with numerous citations for many words, including seventeen for brickfielder. His definitional style was much more formal than Lentzner’s, and he provided taxonomic names for many of the Australian species of flora and fauna which he was documenting for the first time, such as xanthorrhoea, also known as ‘black boys and grass trees’, and yabby, ‘the Aboriginal names for a small crayfish found in waterholes in many parts of Australia’. From the 500-plus pages of Morris’s dictionary, with its wealth of citations from every decade of the nineteenth century, the distinctly Australian environment and its natural inhabitants come to life, as settlements extended further and further into the ‘bush’ from each capital city.

Although a significant work of lexicography, Morris’s dictionary was not a comprehensive dictionary of English as used in late nineteenth-century Australia. The Australian colloquial idioms that were celebrated as forms of national expression in contemporary publications like The Bulletin magazine are almost entirely absent from the dictionary. A characteristic term of address like mate had been in use for decades to express Australian egalitarianism, but Morris’s eye for scientific details was not apparently matched by an ear for contemporary spoken idiom. His dictionary contains very few informal words, such as those formed with the –ie/-y suffix: bluey, bullocky, swaggie (‘a swagman’), but established idioms like poor/miserable as a bandicoot are buried deep in citations designed to exemplify the ‘insect-eating marsupial animal’. Morris’s ‘Austral English’ is remarkable in its coverage of words for flora and fauna, but does not reflect the democratisation of English in Australia, which was already emerging to become its hallmark in the twentieth century. His dictionary may nevertheless be seen as helping to ‘nativise’ the language, to borrow Schneider’s term for the third phase of its evolution. His full documentation of words relating to the Australian environment articulated what was new and different about it.

The first half of the twentieth century was marked by a dearth of Australian dictionaries; the nation was caught up in major political and social changes, ushered in by the process of Federation (1901), and the integration of individual state systems and currencies into a single national structure. The so-called ‘White Australia policy’ embedded in it erected new barriers to foreign immigration, and tended to underscore Australia’s British heritage, and the importance of maintaining the ties with ‘home’ there. This identification intensified with thousands of Australian soldiers participating alongside British troops in European and Middle-Eastern warfronts in World War I and World War II. Imperial rhetoric underpinned the role of British English as Australia’s external language standard, as well as the so-called ‘cultural cringe’ in mid-century, by which Australians were inclined to devalue their own cultural norms in favour of English or European culture. Reservations about hearing Australian accents on the radio meant that the Australian Broadcasting Commission recruited its radio announcers from England until the 1960s. Likewise, British dictionaries continued to serve as general language references for Australians, partly because of the lack of lexicographic publishing resources in Australia until well into the second half of the twentieth century. The first dictionary to carry Australia’s name in its title was Grahame Johnstone’s Australian Pocket Oxford Dictionary (1976), but it was based on the 1924 edition of the Pocket Oxford Dictionary of Current English, edited by the Fowler brothers.

The drought in Australian lexicography was finally broken by Gerald Wilkes’s Dictionary of Australian Colloquialisms (1978), published by Sydney University Press. Again, this dictionary documented a particular segment of Australian English, but it captured an ample range of rural and urban colloquial words and idioms, mostly documented from Australian literary fiction. They conjure up Australian social types: the barracker and the boss cocky, the ratbag and the rorter; and notable behaviours – mad as a cut snake/a meat axe, rough as bags/guts/buggery – where the comparison can be varied to suit the context. Both kinds of neologism contribute to the vitality of oral discourse, and at the same time to establishing solidarity among fellow Australians. Thus, Wilkes’s dictionary was the first to represent the distinctive elements of Australian oral culture, and to affirm their place in the nation’s vocabulary. It demonstrated the importance of regional phraseologies in the nativisation of Australian English, providing documentation of its ‘cultural scripts’ (Wierzbicka 1997).

National Dictionaries: The Reference Dictionary and the Dictionary of Record

Australian national sentiment was raised during the 1980s in anticipation of the bicentenary of Australia’s foundation. It stimulated a sense of national identity among the population at large, and coincided with the publication of two national dictionaries. They complement each other in codifying Australian English for its users, and benchmark its endonormative phase.

A specially formed company called Macquarie Library, backed by a consortium of Australian newspapers, published the Macquarie Dictionary (1981), a comprehensive dictionary of Australian English of 80,000 words. It was compiled by lexicographers at Macquarie University in Sydney to document the full range of ‘mainstream’ Australian usage (Leitner 2004), both distinctively Australian words and senses and the numerous elements of contemporary English shared with other varieties worldwide. The Macquarie Dictionary contrasts with the Australia National Dictionary (1988), constructed on historical principles like the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) and headquartered at the Australian National Dictionary Centre (Ramson 2002), which focuses strictly on ‘Australianisms’ – words and senses that originated in Australia. Its stock of c. 7,500 words, systematically illustrated with a wealth of citations from different kinds of Australian texts, made it a resource for scholarly inquiry rather than everyday use. Both are indigenous dictionaries in the sense of being compiled by Australians and published in Australia. They contrast with other ‘desk’ dictionaries published since, whose content consists largely of material compiled by British-based dictionary publishers, such as Oxford or Collins, with an admixture of Australian entries to localise them to a greater or lesser extent. Both national dictionaries have since been updated to maintain their coverage of the Australian lexicon; the Macquarie Dictionary is now in its seventh edition (2017) in two volumes, and the Australian National Dictionary in its second edition (2016), also in two volumes.

The two national dictionaries of the 1980s served to valorise Australian English for Australians with reflections of their history (Moore 2008). Verbal images are drawn from the steadily expanding range of Australian across the major literary genres, as discussed by Webby (2000) – a phenomenon commonly associated with the establishment of a new variety of English. Thus grounded, the national dictionaries reflect and define countless details of Australian society and culture.

Standardisation and the Dictionary

The Australian dictionaries noted above have all contributed to articulating aspects of the language used in the southern continent over more than two centuries. Yet those with limited size or restricted scope could hardly serve as a reference dictionary or provide full codification of Australian English. Only a comprehensive national dictionary could do this: to establish the regional variety as a whole for its users, and represent it among the other major varieties of English in the world. The Macquarie Dictionary, published amid the build-up to bicentenary celebrations, became a focal point for national identity, and a manifestation of the mature status of the Australian variety of English. It was affordable through discounts provided by the supporting newspapers, and was thus accessible to the general Australian public.

All these factors helped to embed the local dictionary in Australian society at large, to make it the reference dictionary for details of Australian usage and an instrument of standardisation. It has been adopted in the Australian education sector, and is widely referred to in editorial circles and in commercial and government publishing. The Macquarie Dictionary adopted –ise spellings rather than the traditional Oxford –ize for all words and neologisms that contain the suffix, in tandem with the preferred spelling of the Australian Government Style Manual (1966 on), thus affirming the local preference. It also indicates the Australian preference on other variable spellings, and foregrounds local senses of shared words.

The Macquarie Dictionary’s role in standardising Australian English spelling is probably a factor in preserving its mostly British tradition in orthography, as noted in a recent worldwide study of American influence on world English (Gonçalves et al. 2017). Their research on variable British-American points of spelling and lexical selections showed that Australia was among the most conservative countries of the world – including both English-speaking and non-English-speaking countries – in maintaining the British elements. The fact that Australians have a fully codified version of their own variety to refer to, including both conservative and innovative aspects of the lexicon, suggests that the dictionary does have a standardising effect on Australian usage.

The Contribution of Australian Dictionaries to World English

Australian dictionaries have undoubtedly contributed to dictionaries of world English, and to world English itself. Morris’s scholarly entries on the flora and fauna of Australia, enshrined in his Austral English Dictionary, were taken over into the first edition of the OED. His successors working on the Australian National Dictionary have likewise contributed to the OED’s second edition, with further additions to the ongoing third edition online. The engagement between the parent publishing company and the satellite operation in the Australian National Dictionary Centre has been effective in ensuring that Australian lexical innovations are included in the record of world English.

The codification of Australian English in Australian publications has supported its recognition in other kinds of world English dictionaries, such as learner’s dictionaries. Notable among them is the Cambridge International Dictionary of English (1995), which indicated Australian English selections alongside British and American variants, for the benefit of second language learners in the antipodes.

The take-up of Australian words and phrases overseas did not of course depend on access to Australian print dictionaries. Rather, the increasingly global reach of English-language media (print, broadcast, and online) has helped to circulate them in entertainments and informative discourse of many kinds. Early travel publications and newspaper reports took indigenous Australian words like boomerang and kangaroo to the northern hemisphere, and subsequent trade in the exotic carried the budgerigar to the northern hemisphere as a domestic bird. While these early borrowings were specifically associated with Australia, the geographical association becomes attenuated, as when boomerang is applied to a similar wooden instrument used by African peoples, and budgerigar becomes the byname for other exotic cage birds. Compounds such as kangaroo court and boomerang baby/child, which originated in the US, show how words for physical objects originating in Australia can be taken up in figurative ways in other varieties of English, with fresh social denotations and connotations.

The Australian penchant for coining informal words with –ie (originating in British usage for speaking with children), has returned to the home country as informal adult usage in TV serials such as the long-running Neighbours. Since -ie words are usually interpretable in context, they go across varieties quite easily, and prompt similar ad hoc formations in the British context, as may be observed. The impact of this type of Australian neologism can be seen in the more frequent use of –ie in adult conversation elsewhere in the world. Rapid communication via the Internet ensures that new words may be taken up overseas very quickly, and so their point of origin in world English is less obvious in shared technology. The fact that selfie was first recorded in an Australian newspaper in 2006 aligns with it being an Australian coining as an –ie abbreviation. While this underscores its likely origin in the southern hemisphere, it is less obvious given the increased use of –ie forms in both British and American English.

One final factor to consider is the stylistic contribution of Australian colloquial language to world English – since its take-up in the northern hemisphere can be seen as contributing to the now well recognised colloquialisation of world English (Mair 2006). In informal contexts anywhere, informal Australian words and phrases slip into common usage, and their shared English elements belie their place of origin. Their regional neutrality becomes a sign of their successful assimilation into world English – no longer to be claimed as Australian. But the question remains as to how much Australian English has contributed to the colloquialisation and democratisation of world English.