The English language arrived in Australia with the first motley bunch of European settlers on 26 January 1788. Today there is clearly a distinctive Australian regional dialect with its own place among the global family of ‘Englishes’. How did this come about? Where did the distinctive pattern, accent, and verbal inventions that make up Aussie English come from? A lively narrative, this book tells the story of the birth, rise and triumphant progress of the colourful dingo lingo that we know today as Aussie English.
For the first time the story of Australian English is about to be told in full. It is written for people who want to know where Australian English came from, what the forces were that moulded it, why it takes its present form, and where it is going. Australian author and content.
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.
Have you ever wondered if time travel is actually possible? Or where the Australian accent came from? Or what it feels like to have dementia? If you’re an inquisitive person who likes to understand how things came to be the way they are, this collection of thought-provoking explainers from The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald has got you covered. Explain That answers some of the year’s – and life’s – most baffling questions. Thoroughly researched and eloquently set out by some of Australia’s finest journalists, it provides nourishment for curious minds and fun facts to share with friends and family. What do sharks want (and why do they bite)? How do you win an Oscar? Who thought up table manners? Funny, weird and insightful topics are inventively illustrated and embellished with diagrams, pictures and factoids. If you like to learn new things, if you enjoy trivia or you want to reflect on some of the big questions, this is the book for you. Absorbing, illuminating and always engaging, Explain That is for anyone who has ever asked how and why?
English for the Australian Curriculum Book 1 privileges student experience, creative engagement with texts, moments of reflection and deep thinking. Drawing on an inquiry model of learning, it provides opportunities for students to write and create their own texts. Written for the Australian Curriculum, English for the Australian Curriculum Book 1 provides a fully balanced and integrated approach to the study of language, literature and literacy. It actively engages students with texts at a variety of levels: • Develops language skills at word, sentence and text level, with activities in reading, writing, viewing, creating, listening and speaking • Encourages student writing across a variety of contexts, for a variety of purposes and for a variety of audiences • Underlines the importance of visual literacy • Provides opportunities for students to create their own multimodal texts
One day, on the banks of a billabong, a very clever dingo caught a wombat... and decided to make... Wombat stew, Wombat stew, Gooey, brewy, Yummy, chewy, Wombat stew! In this classic Australian picture book, a dingo catches a wombat and wants to cook him in a stew. But all the other bush animals have a plan to save their friend. They trick the dingo into using mud, feathers, flies, bugs and gumnuts in his stew, and the result is something the dingo will never forget!
A groundbreaking history of worldwide English in all its dialects, differences, and linguistic delights: “Informative . . . distinctive . . . a spirited celebration.” —The Guardian In this “well-informed and appealing” work (Publishers Weekly), David Crystal puts aside the usual focus on “standard” English, and instead provides a startlingly original view of where the richness, creativity, and diversity of the language truly lies—in the accents and dialects of nonstandard English users all over the world. Whatever their regional, social, or ethnic background, each group has a story worth telling, whether it is in Scotland or Somerset, South Africa or Singapore. He reminds us that for several hundred wonderful years, there was no such thing as “incorrect” English—and traces the evolution of the language from a few thousand Anglo-Saxons to the 1.5 billion people who speak it today. Moving from Beowulf to Chaucer to Shakespeare to Dickens and the present day, Crystal puts regional speech and writing at center stage, giving a sense of the social realities behind the development of English. This significant shift in perspective enables us to understand for the first time the importance of everyday, previously marginalized, voices in our language—and provides an argument too for the way English should be taught in the future. “A work of impeccable scholarship [that] could easily serve as a standard textbook for students of linguistics, but Mr. Crystal, reaching out to a more general audience, recognizes that even the most avid reader might flinch at the sections on Old Norse grammatical influence. Cleverly, he has sprinkled the book with little digressions, set apart in boxes, that address historical mysteries, strange loanwords, interesting etymologies and the like.” —The New York Times “Learned and often provocative . . . demonstrates repeatedly that common conceptions about language are often historically inaccurate—split infinitives bothered no one until recently (likewise sentence-ending prepositions).” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review) “Simply the best introductory history of the English language family that we have. The plan of the book is ingenious, the writing lively, the exposition clear, and the scholarly standard uncompromisingly high.” —J.M. Coetzee, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature
49 stories ranging over 120 years. Stories reflect life in Australia from the early days of hardship to the recognition of a multicultural society and the new agendas for women's, gay and lesbian, and Aboriginal writing.
