Australian English Regionalisms

If you are interested in hearing how Australians from different parts of the continent pronounce English words, all you need to do is to visit Macquarie University website and do a few clicks on the map..


A new interactive website launched this Australia Day is the first publicly accessible resource to detail information about the formation of the Australian accent and how it has evolved.

Australian Voices was developed by Macquarie University speech scientists Dr Felicity Cox and Dr Sallyanne Palethorpe as part of an ongoing study of the way Australians speak.

Visitors to the site can listen to audio files and compare accents and dialects belonging to different cultural, social and regional groups, and can even participate in the research by submitting audio files of their own speech or that of family members.

A person's accent can vary depending on their age and gender, as well as their social, cultural and regional history or affiliation. Until recently, researchers classified speakers of Australian English - those born in Australia or raised here from a young age - into one of three categories - either broad (colloquially described as ‘ocker'), cultivated (a more British sounding accent type) or general (the accent spoken by the majority of Australian English speakers).

To more accurately define Australian English as it stands today, Cox and Palethorpe have broadened the definition of Australian English by identifying three different dialect sub-groups - Standard Australian English, Australian Aboriginal English and various Ethnocultural Australian English varieties - and say this new classification system is more inclusive of the variation that is present amongst Australian English speakers.

Accents are always changing, and Australian English today is very different from that which was spoken 100 years ago. Milestone events in Australia's history have been paralleled by linguistic change, and so even speakers of general Australian English sound very different today than they did in the past.

"The way we speak is closely tied to identity, social dynamics and social cohesiveness," Cox said. "It's an instinctive thing - we find ourselves slotting into the speech patterns of the people we spend the most time with and this is particularly true of children and adolescents who are the initiators of accent change."

The website invites users to explore accent change through the extensive use of audio files, which take listeners on a linguistic journey spanning 100 years.

"People are often reminded of their grandparents when they listen to our early audio clips," Cox said. "Many factors have played a part in shaping the way we speak, from the dialect mix that was present in the early days of the colony, to social change during World War I, the dismissal of the Whitlam Government, and the increasing linguistic diversity resulting from Multiculturalism."

On Translating Arabic Literature

Kilito, A. (2008) Thou Shalt Not Speak My Language. Syracuse University Press

It has been said that the difference between a language and a dialect is that a language is a dialect with an army. Both the act of translation and bilingualism are steeped in a tension between surrender and conquest, yielding conscious and unconscious effects on language. First published in Arabic in 2002, Abdelfattah Kilito's Thou Shalt Not Speak My Language explores the tension between dynamics of literary influence and canon formation within the Arabic literary tradition. As one of the Arab world's most original and provocative literary critics, Kilito challenges the reader to reexamine contemporary notions of translation, bilingualism, postcoloniality, and the discipline of comparative literature. Waïl S. Hassan's superb translation makes Thou Shalt Not Speak My Language available to an English-speaking audience for the first time, capturing the charm and elegance of the original in a chaste and seemingly effortless style.

At the center of Kilito's work is his insistence on the ethics of translation. He explores the effects of translation on the genres of poetry, narrative prose, and philosophy. Kilito highlights the problem of cultural translation as an interpretive process and as an essential element of comparative literary studies. In close readings of al-Jahiz, Ibn Rushd, al-Saffar, and al-Shidyaq, among others, he traces the shifts in attitude toward language and translation from the centuries of Arab cultural ascendancy to the contemporary period, interrogating along the way how the dynamics of power mediate literary encounters across cultural, linguistic, and political lines.

And an excerpt from a review of the book by Kanishk Tharoor, an associate editor at openDemocracy:

[T]ranslation, particularly in the world of Arabic letters, has never been an innocent or simple process. In his slim, energetic work Thou Shalt Not Speak My Language, the Moroccan scholar Abdelfattah Kilito burrows into the age-old problem of the translation of Arabic literature. The book, itself translated from Arabic, privileges anecdote over argument, drifting playfully through the centuries to explore the relationship between the Arab and the foreign. Kilito indulges in a wide panoramic view, taking into account writings of numerous periods and styles, including ninth century theoretical musings on Persian-Arabic translation, various accounts of Arab travel writing (including Ibn Battuta’s famous journey to China), and passages from 20th century crime novels. This disparate material is shaped by the premise that there is something essentially unsound and compromised about the very act of translation, and that foreigners have yet to treat Arabic literature with appropriate sensitivity and care.

While numerous philosophical, historical and scientific works crossed into Arabic, barely any poetry made the same journey. As early as al Jahiz, the ninth century Afro-Arab writer, Arab scholars had already begun to argue that while it was possible to translate philosophy, the same could not be said of literature. Poetry in its very nature resists the estranging force of translation. “Whenever we find [the translator] speaking two languages, we know that he has mistreated both of them, for each one of the two languages pulls at the other, takes from it, and opposes it.”

Kilito himself seems to share in this distrust, but his own suspicion grows from more modern, political roots in the inversion of power relations with Europe and in the experience of colonialism. Breached and looted, Arabic has been invaded by the west. The problem now is not one of translating into Arabic, but of the implications of translation from Arabic. “The fundamental change for us in the modern age,” Kilito says, “is that the process of reading and writing is always attended with potential translation, the possibility of transfer into other literatures, something that never occurred to the ancients, who conceived of translation only within Arabic literature.” Classical Arab poets never considered the world of letters beyond their own. Their contemporary counterparts have no option but to do so.

The translation of Arab literature into western languages yokes it to western sensibilities and conventions. As Kilito muses, “Who can read an Arab poet or novelist today without establishing a relationship between him and his European peers? We Arabs have invented a special way of reading: we read an Arabic text while thinking about the possibility of transferring it into a European language (...) Woe to the writers for whom we find no European counterparts: we simply turn away from them, leaving them in a dark, abandoned isthmus, a passage without mirrors to reflect their shadow or save them from loss and deathlike abandon.”

Of course, the sins of translation are not simply those of Europeans. Though he laments the fate of these marooned Arab writers, Kilito opens the book with his own account of the pitfalls of cross-cultural translation. Invited to give a lecture in France on al Hamadhani’s maqamat (a 10th century collection of stories written in rhymed prose), Kilito describes his struggle to find a way to make the genre comprehensible to a contemporary European audience. The only European contemporary to al Hamadhani, he finds, is an obscure female German poet named Roswitha, who wrote dialogues in verse. He declines to make this connection – it strikes him as absurd, for who in his audience will have heard of Roswitha – but in his lecture he does equate the maqamat with the picaresque novels popular in Spain in the 16th and 17th centuries.

Whatever uncertainties Kilito himself holds about the possibility of translations, they are not – seeming observations of fact. Instead, they were forged in the furnace of recent Arab-European history and, more importantly perhaps, in the memory of colonisation by the French, who were far more aggressive in their use of language as a pacifying and “civilising” tool than the British. However poignant within their own context, Kilito’s doubts about multilingualism carry a whiff of the parochial about them. [He] argues that “to speak a language is to turn to a side. Language is tied to a location on the map or a given space. To speak this or that language is to be on the right or the left ... and since [the bilingual] looks in two directions, he is two-faced.” This is a real dilemma for Kilito. But it forgets that multilingualism in much of the world is (and was) a comfortable, untortured fact of life. Language is not always wedded to geographical and political loyalties. That Kilito suggests it is says much about a common Arab and European understanding of language: not the caliphate-era vision of language spread boundlessly by the sword and the book, but a vision of a fissured landscape of languages, each guarded by its own political project, its own nation. To accept this view of the world is to succumb to that false cliché produced by the era of the modern European nation-state: a language is but “a dialect with an army.”

We can forgive Kilito, perched as he is in Rabat, on the joined frontiers of Arab and European history. Just as poetry (in al Jahiz’s view) could not be lifted from its original language and dropped into another, Kilito’s misgivings about multilingualism should not be translated out of their own context. His book should be understood as a commentary on the Arab experience of translation, not on translation in general (...) He even questions his own doubts about translation, spying an unsettling chauvinism in his jealous guardianship of Arabic from the European interloper.

For all your English to Arabic and vice versa translations that will help you expand your business into the Middle East visit Arabic Language Experts at http://www.arabic.com.au/.

On Dialects and English..

A few choicy pieces from a very well written posting by Balthazar Oesterhoudt :

"Americans speak a wholly different language than the average Briton. Europeans who learn English unanimously confirm this to me. They say that it’s much harder to understand an American than an Englishman, primarily because Americans phonetically alter sounds that appear different in writing. For example, the word “getting” looks like it should contain a “t” sound. Yet when an average American says it, there is no “t” to be heard. At most, you will hear a “d” to replace the “t” (ie, “gedding”). At the least, you will hear a strange, swallowed “-nnh” sound to replace “-tting” altogether (ie, “getting” degenerates into a half-swallowed “ge-nnh”). For a foreigner who learns to pronounce every sound he reads, these American dialectic differences cause immense confusion. By contrast, a Briton does pronounce a “t” in “getting." They do not swallow or alter sounds, allowing the foreigner to more easily hear what he remembers seeing in writing."

He hasn't heard some parts of UK, or Murphy Creek, QLD. We got our Volvo stuck in 50 cm of mud after a rain while viewing a property up on the range. Both our mobiles had no connection - bless living in the country - and the property owner had gone that morning to hospital because his wife was delivering (at least that's what it sounded on the phone). We ended up walking for 40 minutes before we came across a property with humans on it - the rest was occupied by snorting equines and mad Blue Heelers. We waved the guy on the motorised mower down and he allowed us in to use his phone for RACQ. Although he spoke understandable English to us (not much of conversation, he seemed to find ours difficult), what flew out of his mouth when he spoke to his mother was a total surprise. Neither Dan and I could make sense of it, at most maybe a word here or there. Mind you, he was not a foreigner.. what he spoke was English.

It was many months later that I told this story to another friend who lives up in Toowoomba, and she said "Bushie". I still have to research what "Bushie Australian" is like.

Another place where English is not English would be the Town Called Alice. The amount of Aboriginal words mixed into it makes it officially a separate language. Now, mind you, there are more than one tribe in Alice, and they speak different indigenous languages, so this is a green salad-pidgin made of more than just two languages.

I was also fascinated by how our Kimberly interpreters, and the translator from Torres Strait Islands spoke English. Given, it is not their first language, but they are very fluent in it. It is the intonation, the inflections, all that music of language that was new to my ears - so much softer, gentler, calmer than the barking of Sydney or the Melbournian machine-guns. Then again, it was shorter than the Queensland drawl. Fascinating.

Enough of me. Back to Oesterhoudt:

"English is a Germanic language that likes to masquerade in Latin finery, but without Latin charm or grace. English is not romantic; it is schizophrenic and crass. Because English draws on so many linguistic traditions, it can express the same thought in two, three or even four ways. For example, to express the idea “a door leading out,” we can say “Exit,” from the Latin “ex” (“out”) and “it” (“he goes”), or we can opt for the good old German “Way Out,” from “weg” (“way”) “aus” (“out”). “Exit” sounds more official and more serious than “way out.” “Way out” is prosaic. It sounds too obvious. For better or worse, English has confused itself into thinking that Latin words are somehow more “urbane” than German ones, even though our German words are much more basic and convey meaning much more readily than Latin imitations. "

Which language is not schizophrenic and crass? All European languages have roots in Greek and Latin; Many Asian countries have roots in Sanskrit; Arabic travelled both west and east and left its marks on both Spanish (and jumped with it to South America) and Hindi, not to mention Dari, Farsi, etc. Central Asian languages all carry both Chinese and Turkic elements. In the globalized village, everyone borrows from everyone.

But whereas you can ask a person to leave in more than one way in English, in Arabic I can express amazement, displeasure, approval, doubt, despair and much more with a single term - Ya Salam - by changing the intonation.

Oesterhoudt goes on to propose that the core of English language consists of the prepositions, because they "express the locations of objects or actions. We cannot precisely describe things we see or hear. In short, prepositions allow us to linguistically depict our experiences to others. "

Just as an experiment, I will try to spend this evening talking to Dan without the use of prepositions. We will see how much gets lost in translation.

For all your English to Arabic and vice versa translations that will help you expand your business into the Middle East visit Arabic Language Experts at http://www.arabic.com.au/

Pommies Making Fun of Kiwis?

Only on Sky Sport (http://www.skysports.com/story/0,19528,12325_3680560,00.html) can you see such lack of tact towards other "Englishes":

"Language

All of us here meanwhile are still coming to terms with the cultural differences between New Zealand and dear old Blighty. Here, and at no added expense, is a quick guide to the language and the customs:

To start with, "chicken" is something you do when you arrive at an airport.

The "flight-dick" is what the pilot sits on.

A "pin" is what you write with.

A "pun" is what you pop balloons with.

I don't know how you say "no pun intended".

Three times two is "sux".

Honeymooning couples are expected to have "six".

*****

Which woodwork did this ignoramus come out of? Two by three is sex, as I can ascertain from my wonderful osteopath.. "See you at sex, Sam, next Thursday.." I wish! Instead, I get a good cracking of my spine, but no sex :-D

If anything "sux", it is the writer of the above article.

Not fair dinkum at all. The Poms better get their interpreters with them when they come to the country of "where the hell are yeah?"