AUSTRALIA 1
The speech of
London neighbouring counties like Essex and Middlesex was sent into a remote
exile when England’s petty criminals were shipped as convicts to the penal
colony of New South Wales.
Old unseaworthy
ships, often dismasted, were moored in the rivers and estatuaries
and became floating prisons for people sentenced to transportation. They housed
the petty criminals of industrial England before the long sea voyage to the
penal colonies of Australia.
They were many
English voices on board but the predominant one was from London area. In fact,
Cockneys accounted for more than one third of the original generation of
Australians.
The first penal
settlements in Australia were in Sydney and near Hobart in Tasmania.
The convicts’
new home was strange and exotic. Like the first settlers in America, they
borrowed words from the native Aborigines to describe things they’d never seen
before. Like the coolibah tree and
the boomerang, billabong, a waterhole, and corroboree,
a gathering and place names like Wogawoga,
Woolamaloo and Woomera.
The convicts
also adopted Aborigine words like kangaroo,
wallaby, bandicoot, budgerigar, wombat, koala and dingo.
Convicts and
Aborigines meeting for the first time communicated in Pidgin English. The
Australianism walkabout is an early
example of Pidgin English Down Under. Among the convicts the first visitors to
Australia noticed the dominating tones of London English.
Australian
Linguist, Professor John Bernard: “The greatest number came from London and the
counties immediately around London. So, naturally there is a big influence into
Australian English from London forms of speech. This is most evident in the
pronunciation. You have the broad “a” sound, which probably belongs in both
dialects and you do have some words and some word patterns like rhyming slang.”
The first
Australians invented their own rhyming slang: ducks and geese for police, and a Captain Cook for a look.
“Manifestos of
the First Fleet showed that convicts came from every county of England and
Scotland and Ireland and so many of the words which Australians think are
Australian are in fact county words from Great Britain, words like cobber and wowser. Wowser meaning a killjoy came from the rural
north; Cobber meaning a friend, came
from Suffolk; larrikin, a youth –from
Warwickshire; Billy as in billycan, from Scotland; and barracking, rowdy encouragement and a corker, a very good thing, from Ireland.
The bulk of the
early Europeans in Australia were, of course, convicts and they brought with
them the so called “flash language”, which was a highly developed jargon which
the criminals classes used and which I suppose the people who were not quite
criminal, but had been convicted, learnt on the ships. And the consequence was
that there was an early complaint from the magistrates that they couldn’t
understand what was being said in their own courts. And Flash Jim Vaux, who
managed to get himself transported three times, in 1812, wrote a short
vocabulary of the Flash Language ostensibly to help the magistrates.