Understanding the place of Australian English: exploring folk linguistic accounts through contemporary Australian authors

Abstract

This paper explores Australian English (AuE), utilising a folk linguistic approach and engaging with its use in novel-writing. It is argued that discussions by contemporary Australian authors about their approaches to writing and voicing characters, and the actual voices authors give to their characters can be used as data to gain new understandings of what language forms have social meanings within AuE. The value of this analytical approach is then illustrated with interview and text extracts from one Australian author, revealing that this type of analysis provides insights into both the folk linguistic understandings of an author and how language variation is employed within the fiction series to index local types. It is concluded that such an approach can be generalised to better understand variation in AuE as accessed by other language-focussed professions and their differing conceptualisations of language, as well as to further understand variation in other varieties of English, and in other languages.

Keywords:

• Australian English
• folk linguistics
• sociolinguistic variation
• language ideologies
• social meaning
• Australian fiction

Notes

1. Note that authors may have more technical and specific ways of speaking about language than shown here as the materials consulted in this section are aimed at novice writers.

2. In fact, anyone who has taught discourse analysis is highly aware of the great success of writers in achieving an appearance of real talk: despite the constant contrary evidence of the speech people are surrounded by every day, they generally seem to think that it is like fictional dialogue. Students new to seeing transcriptions of talk are often surprised by the shortness of turns, commonness of overlaps, frequency of pragmatic markers and so on. They are also often struck by the idea that talk is mundane and ritualised, and may be just about maintaining relationships rather than profound information sharing or displays of personality and emotion. This suggests that models from fiction loom large in understandings of speech.

3. Red Tom was a communist (a reference to the red flag).

4. A shortening of plates of meat, rhyming slang for feet.

5. Within the state of Victoria, the state of Queensland is associated with ‘bad language’ use (Mulder & Penry Williams, 2014; Penry Williams, 2011).

6. To give someone the grues is to make them shiver.

7. ‘Communists’.

8. ‘Fitzroy’, a suburb of Melbourne.

9. SP:‘starting price bookmaker’, an illegal practice involving an unlicensed bookmaker who operates off racetracks and pays starting price odds.