Australian English Changing

Australian English essay

“How is Australian English changing to reflect the evolving identity of Australians in the twenty-first century? Discuss at least two of the subsystems in your response.”

The Australian identity is an extremely unique variety of English that is continuously changing to reflect the evolving identity in the twenty-first century. Ever since the development of technology, these technological advances have had a large impact on the English language used in both spoken and written texts in order to reflect such a change. Australian English is no exception by adopting expressions and neologisms to become a part of the international advancement. Although we have also adopted many terms from American English as well as
These ‘Americanisms’ including parts of speech from those of the increasing television world that our society is beginning to accept as our main source of entertainment. In everyday speech, people, especially those of a younger generation, are starting to use more of the American discourse particles such as ‘whatever’, ‘like’, ‘so’, ‘my bad’, and the term ‘dissing’ in replace of ditching (are you dissing me?). Lexical items also including ‘gotten’, ‘guys’ as gender neutral and ‘ketchup’ becoming more used in replace of ‘tomato sauce’ or even the previous Australian slang ‘dead horse’. The film industry is also causing younger kids to pick up the phonological difference in their speech with those even putting on an American sounding accent when pronouncing the said discourse particles, or even with other words such as saying ‘ax’ as ask, or ‘write me’ as a grammatically incorrect way of saying ‘write to me’, with the omission of the preposition being seen throughout America as acceptable such as in protests using ‘protest the war’, with this being used here more frequently with the lack of the correct preposition ‘protest against the war’. There appears to be a need for Australian media to connect better to the American audience to create a better international relationship, with shows like Australian’s version of ‘The Biggest Loser’ using calories as a measure even though the correct measure here is kilojoules, and Australian cricket using ‘step up to the plate’ adopted from the American baseball, rather then saying ‘step up to the wicket’. Even the Australian Labor Party is spelt with the American spelling of ‘labor’ when in Australia the correct spelling for this is ‘labour’. Although it can be argued that we are starting to move towards their culture as we progress through the twenty-first