Uncle Sam and Britannia: the character of Australian English

The two most common complaints about language in Australia are that our language is in decline and that we are being overrun by Americanisms. Here are the realities.

The first of these woes has been common since the 16th century, though if English is indeed in decline, it has shown staunch resilience to become the dominant single world language. The second complaint is more recent. While many link the two - “our language is in decline and its major malaise is American content” - we need to keep them apart.

Australian English, like all other Englishes around the world, is undergoing a major influx of Americanisms. This is wholly natural. People imitate the powerful and prestigious, and American English is currently the most powerful and prestigious variety of English. The two most recognised words globally are OK and Coke, and both are American.

I have a database of nearly 10,000 American words, phrases and usages which I have gathered from Australian English: pronunciations like perfUme; grammar examples like nominate for a position (we used to nominate someone for a position); playing ON the team ON the weekend (in the team, at the weekend?); forms of words like gotten and the coat fit him well last year (fitted?); and thousands of words and phrases, from franks and abs to sneakers and high five.

Many older Australian expressions have slid quietly from view: bonzer, boshter, and later ace and grouse. In their place we find that all our most common expressions of approval are American: the ubiquitous great, accompanied by neat, cool, groovy, filth, sweet and a host of others. Our greetings are increasingly American: not only hullo for British hello, but hi, and on parting have a nice day. Our no worries jostles for place with the American no sweat. I have a record of mom and - from Hervey Bay - center.

And yet our English doesn't sound American. Our 2004 election was in a different key from the American Presidential race. Peter Manning made a similar point in The Brisbane Line recently when he reminded us of David Malouf's “Made in England: Australia's British inheritance” (Quarterly Essays 12, 2003). Manning describes Malouf's view of Australian English like this:

... Australia inherited a particular mode of English that shunned abuse, passion and rhetoric (the kind that inhabits American English) and instead opted for gentleness, argument and practicality. He's in high praise of the moderateness of our language, of our institutions and of our society.

“Abuse, passion and rhetoric” in American English? Thoreau hardly fits with that description, nor does Emily Dickinson. But if we think of the stereotypical tone of American English, especially public American English, it can have a declamatory edge which would sound off-key in Australia.

Malouf himself evokes several layers of Britain in his mosaic of Australian English. Many of these belong to his own childhood, symbolised by Australians absorbing British content and still sending their offspring to be educated in England; or returning the compliment by imitation, as with the singer Peter Dawson. My own childhood, scarcely more than a decade after Malouf's, is full of the hyper-Britannic Biggles and the Archers of Ambridge, and of the very heroic accents of Albion used by Australians in programs like ABC radio's Argonauts.

But Malouf digs deeper than this. Some of the symbols are there in his gentle evocation of his Lebanese father, and the Worcestershire sauce and Yorkshire pudding of Malouf's youth; his father's respect for British models of “... fair play, decency, manliness, concern for the weak and helpless, a belief that life, in the end, was serious”.

But all this grew somewhat differently in Australian air. It had arrived with the rest of the motley baggage that reached Botany Bay:

... British Low Church puritanism and fear of the body and its pleasures - but also British drunkenness; British pragmatism and distrust of theory; British philistinism and dislike of anything showy, theatrical, arty or “too serious”; British good sense and the British sense of humour - all there for us to deal with and develop in our own way, or after due consideration to reject.

This is half a world away from the Pilgrim Fathers. We can see some of this contrast in our public documents. The Australian Constitution is sober, devout but undeclamatory:

Whereas the people of New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia, Queensland, and Tasmania, humbly relying on the blessing of Almighty God, have agreed to unite in one indissoluble Federal Commonwealth under the Crown of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, and under the Constitution hereby established ...

Compare that to the American Constitution:

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

Or the even more rousing, high-minded and abstract Declaration of Independence:

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

During the century and a quarter that separate these documents, and the nearly two centuries that separate the Mayflower from Botany Bay, English moved from the declamatory abstractions of the seventeenth century to the industrial nuts and intellectual bolts of the late eighteenth.

These patterns persist even now. Here is President Bush announcing the Iraq war:

The United States, with other countries, will work to advance liberty and peace in that region. Our goal will not be achieved overnight, but it can come over time. The power and appeal of human liberty is felt in every life and every land. And the greatest power of freedom is to overcome hatred and violence, and turn the creative gifts of men and women to the pursuits of peace. Good night, and may God continue to bless America.

We don't invoke God to underwrite our foreign policy, and we don't use phrases like “the power and appeal of human liberty”. We back away from abstractions, and are more stingy with adjectives and political flourishes.

For that matter, we don't have an Oath of Allegiance to be said in schools and on public occasions, and if we did, we would find it hard to find the right tone of voice. Our national anthem has a good tune but gawky lyrics. The closest we get to solemnity is on Anzac Day in Binyon's well known words of remembrance:

They shall not grow old,
As we that are left grow old,
Age shall not weary them
Nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun,
And in the morning,
We will remember them!

But then Binyon is British.

But this is not typical. For the rest of the Australian year our tone of voice is our own: sometimes raucous, often pungent, understated, fatal to tall poppies and sympathetic to battlers; a mixture of John Clarke, Edna Everidge, Roy and H.G. We are becoming internationally famous for phrases like flat out like a lizard drinking, or for word plays like ambo, fierie and pollies: what other country would have politicians share a name with parrots?

We prefer our political leaders to be concise rather than wordy, to sound more like a mate with a beer at a barbie. The political bons mots that we remember are rather the Democrats' slogan “Keep the bastards honest” of a few years ago. Where else could bastard be a masthead for a political party? It certainly does not fit with the more sanitised rhetoric of American public political English. Or we remember Whitlam's resonant, flagellating Kerr's cur during the constitutional crisis of 1974.

And if we find that we need to compliment or stroke someone's ego, we may hedge by moderating the emotion, here following the British model of understatement. Or we may do something distinctively un-British, and counterbalance the positive emotion with a potential negative: not you generous person but you generous old bastard. You don't lightly call someone a bastard in Britain or America, where it is more likely to be taken as an insult. In Australia, in an appropriate context and with appropriate tone of voice, it can be indulgent, friendly and solidaristic. We use it between friends and mates. But we downplay the emotion.

Except, that is, in matters of sport. Here we are maximalists, not always magnanimous in defeat, triumphalist and often bombastic in victory. The kind of eulogies reserved by some other countries for their rivers, shores, mountains and peoples are relocated in Australia to teams and sporting heroes. We will brag endlessly in any pub on any continent about the pre-eminence of our sportspersons. Perhaps this is because it is only in sport that we clearly punch above our weight in the international arena. Aussie, Aussie, Aussie, oi, oi, oi!

This does not sound quite like the British. But I suspect that Malouf is right about the way we have built our tone of voice from British material. That does not alter the fact that much of the surface of our language - some of our pronunciation and grammar, and a lot of our vocabulary - are converging with America's.

But not our style. J.F. Kennedy's “Think not what your country can do for you, think rather what you can do for your country” would sound a touch pretentious and overstated in Australia. We'd feel more comfortable if someone asked us just to lend a hand, mate.