Finding the Key to Australian Keywords: The Language of Australian Literature in Context from the mid-19th century until the present
Abstract
Since the arrival of the First Fleet in Australia, the local variety of English took a course of its own. Yet just like the nation itself, to gain independence, it had to shake off the control of the mother country, which included language among its tools of power (see Ashcroft et al., 1989).
The decolonizing process thus included establishing the local vernacular through the process of 'abrogation', which turned the English of the colonial Centre into 'english' of the colony, incorporating local linguistic variants metonymic of cultural difference. According to Schneider's (2007) Dynamic Model of development of post-colonial Englishes, the Australian variety has only recently reached full independence and is now in the last phase, Differentiation.
A major role in the decolonization has been played by literature, through which the local vernacular and the national ethos established around it were put into print and circulated. Therefore, it is a perfect source for exploring the national language through time, and the role of cultural and political context that helped shape it.
Features that carry a lot of cultural meaning in Australian English are those that need not be necessarily Australian in origin, but which have acquired local unique meanings. These may be called keywords, as understood by Wierzbicka (1997), who proposes that certain words reflect the core values of a given culture.
Under Australian keywords, Wierzbicka lists for example mate; yarn, whinge, shout; bastard, bugger, bloody; mozzies, right-o, good-o, Bazza; sook or larrikin, which encompass the important concepts such as mateship, anti-sentimentality, and laid-back nature. This paper examines such keywords in a small corpus of Australian literary fiction (32 novels from mid-19th century to the present).
Divided into four periods based on Schneider's Dynamic Model (Exonormative stabilization, Nativization, Endonormative stabilisaton, Differentiation), keywords have been extracted from the corpus for each period using a parallel corpus of British literary fiction as reference. The findings roughly correspond to Schneider's characterization of each period, with words with cultural significance scoring the highest in the Nativization period, when literature played an active role in forging the new nation, with the Differentiation period coming second, as a time both of linguistic independence as well as re-examination of Australian values strongly ingrained in language.
The second part of this paper concentrates on two keywords and their meaning, connotations, and semantic prosody through time. As Australian culture was built on bush mythology, bush and mate have been selected for analysis.
Both are significantly more frequent in the Australian corpus. While the bush starts simply in the sense of a unique Australian environment, often associated with loneliness, mystery, and danger, it quickly becomes associated with offering shelter, and through time becomes associated with a particular lifestyle and specific qualities of its inhabitants, leading to bushman conveying a set of characteristics (taciturn, strong, self-sufficient).
Even though the bush lifestyle is mainly a thing of the past, these associations still hold now, when bush also appears more in connection with Aboriginal spirituality and pastime activities. Mate begins in the sense of 'ship worker' and 'inmate', from which it progresses to the Australian senses of 'partner in a shared activity' and gradually 'sworn friend'.
What Wierzbicka deems as the crucial components of the Australian sense - spending time together, shared activities, drinking together, looking out for each other - manifests in the concordances from the Nativization period and continues up to the present, though it has strong working-class associations and is used more as a term of address. Ironic uses of mate, which scholars have identified in recent times, have already appeared in the Exonormative stabilization period, and the uses of mate for women go back to the Nativization period, despite the strong masculine associations.
Despite both words' decreased presence in literature, the cultural significance remains high and harks back to the bush myth, even though city life is the reality for most Australians. References: Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures.
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