This paper investigates whether colloquialisation – a stylistic shift by which written genres come to be more similar to spoken genres – has played a role in the endonormativisation of the grammar of Australian English, a variety which has long been noted for its penchant for colloquialism. The study tracks changes in grammatical colloquialism from the early 20th century against the historical backdrop of the progressive decline in Britishness in Australia and the pervasive effects of “Americanisation”. The data are derived from a suite of parallel Brown-family corpora representing British, American, and Australian English of the 1930s, 1960s, 1990s and 2006. Multivariate techniques are used to delimit 26 “colloquial” and “anti-colloquial” grammatical features from a set of 83 potentially relevant features, and to examine changes in their frequencies between 1931 and 2006, in the three varieties, and across the three major genres of fiction, learned writing and press reportage.
Baker, Sidney. 1959. The Drum: Australian Character and Slang. Sydney: Currawong.
Biber, Douglas. 1988. Variation across Speech and Writing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Biber, Douglas. 2003. “Compressed Noun Phrases in Newspaper Discourse: The Competing Demands of Popularization vs. Economy”. In Jean Aitchison, and Diana Lewis, eds. New Media Language. London: Routledge, 169–181.
Biber, Douglas, and Edward Finegan. 1997. “Diachronic Relations among Speech-Based and Written Registers in English”. In Terttu Nevalainen, and Leena Kahlas-Tarkka, eds. To Explain the Present: Studies in the Changing English Language in Honour of Matti Rissanen. Helsinki: Société Neophilologique, 253–275.
Biber, Douglas, and Susan Conrad. 2009. Register, Genre and Style. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Biber, Douglas, and Bethany Gray. 2016. Grammatical Complexity in Academic English: Linguistic Change in Writing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Biber, Douglas, Stig Johansson, Geoffrey Leech, Susan Conrad, and Edward Finegan. 1999. Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English. London: Longman.
Blair, David. 1993. “Australian English and Australian National Identity”. In Gerhard Schultz, ed. The Languages of Australia. Canberra: Australian Academy of the Humanities, 62–70.
Collins, Peter. 2015b. “Diachronic Variation in the Grammar of Australian English: Corpus-Based Explorations”. In Peter Collins, ed. Grammatical Change in English World-Wide. Amsterdam: Benjamins, 15–42.
Collins, Peter, and David Blair. 2000. “Language and Identity in Australia”. In David Blair, and Peter Collins, eds. English in Australia. Amsterdam: Benjamins, 1–13.
Crystal, David. 2001. Language and the Internet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Curran, James. 2004. The Power of Speech: Australian Prime Ministers Defining the National Image. Carlton: Melbourne University Press.
Hackert, Stephanie, and Dagmar Deuber. 2015. “American Influence on Written Caribeanbean English: A Diachronic Analysis of Newspaper Reportage in the Bahamas and in Trinidad and Tobago”. In Peter Collins, ed. Grammatical Change in English World-Wide. Amsterdam: Benjamins, 389–410.
Hornadge, Bill. 1980. The Australian Slanguage. Sydney: Methuen Australia.
Hundt, Marianne. 2013. “The Diversification of English: Old, New, and Emerging Epicentres”. In Daniel Schreier, and Marianne Hundt, eds. English as a Contact Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 182–203.
Hundt, Marianne, and Stefanie Dose. 2012. “Differential Change in British and American English: Comparing Pre- and Post-War Data”. In Sebastian Hoffmann, Paul Rayson, and Geoffrey Leech, eds. English Corpus Linguistics: Looking back, Moving forward. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 79–101.
Hundt, Marianne, and Geoffrey Leech. 2012. “Small is Beautiful: On the Value of Standard Reference Corpora for Observing Recent Grammatical Change”. In Terttu Nevalainen, and Elizabeth Traugott, eds. The Oxford Handbook of the History of English. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 175–188.
Hundt, Marianne, Gerold Schneider, and Elena Seoane. 2016. “The Use of the be-Passive in Academic Englishes: Local vs Global Usage in an International Language”. Corpora 111: 31–63. [10.3366/corp.2016.0084]
Leech, Geoffrey, Marianne Hundt, Christian Mair, and Nicholas Smith. 2009. Change in Contemporary English: A Grammatical Study. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Leech, Geoffrey, and Nicholas Smith. 2009. “Change and Constancy in Linguistic Change: How Grammatical Usage in Written English Evolved in the Period 1931–1991”. In Antoinette Renouf, and Andrew Kehoe, eds. Corpus Linguistics: Refinements and Reassessments. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 173–200.
Mair, Christian. 2009. Twentieth-Century English: History, Variation and Standardization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Mair, Christian, and Marianne Hundt. 1995. “Why is the Progressive Becoming more Frequent in English? A Corpus-Based Investigation of Language Change in Progress”. Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik 431: 111–122
Moore, Bruce. 2008. Speaking our Language: The Story of Australian English. Sydney: Oxford University Press.
Ramson, William S.1966. Australian English: An Historical Study of the Vocabulary, 1788–1898. Canberra: Australian National University Press.
Rühlemann, Christoph, and Martin Hilpert. fc. “Colloquialization in Journalistic Writing: Investigating Inserts in TIME Magazine with a Focus on Well”.
Schneider, Edgar. 2007. Postcolonial English: Varieties of English around the World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Schneider, Edgar. 2014. “New Reflections on the Evolutionary Dynamics of World Englishes”. World Englishes 331: 9–32.
Seal, Graham. 1999. The Lingo: Listening to Australian English. Sydney: UNSW Press.
Ward, Stuart. 2001. “Sentiment and Self-Interest: The Imperial Ideal in Anglo-Australian Commercial Culture”. Australian Historical Studies 1161: 91–108.
Wilkes, Gerald W.1978. A Dictionary of Australian Colloquialisms. Sydney: Sydney University Press.
Wilkes, Gerald W.1986. Exploring Australian English. Sydney: ABC Enterprises.
Yao, Xinyue, and Peter Collins. fc. “Exploring Grammatical Colloquialisation in Non-Native English: A Case Study of Philippine English”. English Language and Linguistics 221.
2024. Negative politeness and no worries in Australian English. World Englishes
Zheng, Shuang & Weiwei Wang
2024. Artificial intelligence and environment behavior psychology based evolution of science fiction movie genres. Current Psychology 43:32 ► pp. 26511 ff.
Baker, Paul
2023. A year to remember?. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 28:3 ► pp. 407 ff.
2020. Linguistic Colloquialisation, Democratisation and Gender in Asian Englishes. In Gender in World Englishes, ► pp. 176 ff.
Collins, Peter & Xinyue Yao
2019. AusBrown: A new diachronic corpus of Australian English. ICAME Journal 43:1 ► pp. 5 ff.
Kruger, Haidee, Bertus van Rooy & Adam Smith
2019. Register Change in the British and Australian Hansard (1901-2015). Journal of English Linguistics 47:3 ► pp. 183 ff.
Yao, Xinyue & Peter Collins
2019. Developments in Australian, British, and American English Grammar from 1931 to 2006: An Aggregate, Comparative Approach to Dialectal Variation and Change. Journal of English Linguistics 47:2 ► pp. 120 ff.
Kruger, Haidee & Adam Smith
2018. Colloquialization versus Densification in Australian English: A Multidimensional Analysis of the Australian Diachronic Hansard Corpus (ADHC). Australian Journal of Linguistics 38:3 ► pp. 293 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 6 september 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
Any errors therein should be reported to them.