Abstract
According to Anna Wierzbicka's keyword theory that a culture's values are embedded in certain items of its lexicon, if one had to choose just one word to represent Australian culture, it would be mate, because it represents "a key to the Australian spirit, Australian national character, Australian ethos" (1997: 101). Despite its British origin and usage in other varieties of English, where it simply serves as an informal term for a friend or companion or a colloquial form of address between equals (OED), the Australian sense, which broadly performs the same functions, additionally encompasses the values of shared company, activities, and experiences, and reflects the attitudes of egalitarianism, solidarity, loyalty, and anti-authoritarianism.
Crucially, the whole concept of mateship goes back to the birth of the Australian national ethos in the 19th century founded on the bush myth and the necessity for people to work together to conquer the new hostile environment (Carter, 2006: 146). That is why it is so strongly linked to Australian values and identity today.
More recent research, however, suggests a certain democratisation of the term and perhaps even a breakaway from these values. Johanna Rendle-Short proposes that it is now more often used by and in reference to women who see mate as a form of address "as a friendly and fun term that, along with many other address forms, is available to show intimacy" (2009: 245).
This paper examines mate throughout the history of Australian English on a small corpus of Australian canonical literature from 1830 up to the present. The corpus is divided into four periods - Exonormative stabilisation, Nativisation, Endonormative stabilisation, and Differentiation - based on Edgar Schneider's Dynamic Model of Development of postcolonial Englishes (2007), where he charts out how the social, historical, and cultural context shapes the linguistic developments in each stage.
It explores how mate acquired the strong association with the national ethos and whether these associations are indeed weakening in the last period, as Rendle-Short suggests. A parallel corpus of British English was created to compare frequencies in the two varieties and (broadly) also their functions.
The results concerning the vocative usage of mate revealed that the range of functions is broad, but can be generalised to a show of friendliness, similarly to the British usage, although with specific connotations related to the national ethos from the Nativisation period on, which results in almost exclusively positive usage, unlike in the British corpus. The referential mate shows that from varied meanings in the Exonormative stabilisation period (naval officer, inmate, partner etc.), the meaning of fellow worker/person in the same situation prevailed in the Nativisation period, and in that context gained the national ethos associations, which by Endonormative stabilisation developed into the quintessentially Australian sense of a "sworn friend" (Moore 2016).
The results show that mate is much more frequent in the Australian corpus than in the British corpus, with 96.37 and 19.19 instances per million respectively, proving its increased cultural significance in the Antipodean variety. Nearly half of the instances of mate appear in the Nativisation period, which according to Schneider's model is a time when the imported English variety truly becomes a national variety with distinctive features.
This was also the time when Australia gained its independence and created the national ethos reliant on mateship, so the high frequency is not surprising. It is in this period that mate is most frequently overtly associated with the values outlined above.
There is a significant decrease of frequency in the Endonormative stabilisation period, which was marked by the so-called cultural cringe - a lack of confidence in local culture - so mate usually appears almost synonymous with friend or as a friendly address term with no overt associations with the national ethos. The Differentation period sees an increase in frequency again, likely due to increased nationalism in this period as well as increased usage amongst women and non-white Australians.