From English in Australia to Australian English

Download or read book From English in Australia to Australian English written by Clemens W. A. Fritz and published by Peter Lang Gmbh, Internationaler Verlag Der Wissenschaften. This book was released on 2007 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From English in Australia to Australian English is the story of how the English language arrived in many different forms in Australia and how it evolved into a uniform variety in its own right. The corpus-based approach used here allowed empirical linguistic investigations that show intricate and intriguing developments. These prove that Australian English is not an ill-defined middle-ground between British and American English; it has its own history and its own future. Millions of words were collected and looked at. Thus the actual language used by settlers and convicts in court, in diaries, in letters, in newspapers, in poems and other text types forms the basis of this book. These results are complemented by in-depth sociohistorical analyses of environments and events that contributed to the formation of an antipodean variety of English.