English Spreading Worldwide

You only have to think of words from Australian English like kangaroo and kookaburra and boomerang and all the rest of them. We have got an incredible number of words, that’s the interesting thing. Wherever English takes root, we lift words from the indigenous languages and then those words become ours.

I talked to you earlier about a taboo, and that’s a word from the South Pacific ‘tapua’ meaning something that you shouldn’t do, a particular thing. But what would we do without a word like that? Then we indigenize it, we turn it into an English word and it becomes a word that everybody uses. We quickly forget that we borrowed it from the South Pacific.

I suppose it would be easier for us to borrow words like that via Australia, people coming back home or coming on visits would bring words like that and then gradually they would be absorbed into the English language.

I think one way in which we might notice an Australian influence would be in the use of ‘e/ie/y’ as a diminutive: Aussie and Brissie. Of course, you have probably always had that sort of thing in Britain and indeed in America as well. But the overlay is used much more widely in Australian English. Great big men using abbreviations that you might think of as diminutives in parts of the world. Cossie for example for a swimsuit, admittedly that’s a wee bit old-fashioned now. But nevertheless, you have men using it and so on.

That sort of thing has come in to Britain and we have also started using a lot of abbreviations like that. The influence always works, I think, two ways and again I talked to this to some of my students who are teenagers and they rather liked ‘spunk’ for a handsome young man, which they have picked up from the soap opera “Neighbours”.

This generation might know where they got it, but in four or five years time ‘spunk’ will either fade or it will have become so integrated that nobody will remember that it was first used perhaps on the media in Australia.