Summary Of The Changes In Australian English From The First Fleet To Present Day

Tracing the changes in Australian English from the First Fleet to present day is really about exploring the story of the nation, author Kel Richards says. The English language arrived in Australia a little more than 200 years ago and since that time it has been levelled, shaped and restyled to give Australians a specific dialect.
"When you trace the story of Australian English from 1788 to the present day, you find yourself actually tracing the story of the whole nation," Richards told 702 ABC Sydney's Dominic Knight. Beyond the influences and movements that shaped our use and understanding of English, Richards said we first needed to think about our belief of language.
"They now say there is no such thing as English, the English language doesn't exist, there are only Englishes, only dialects. "We have our dialects and as it happens, quite by chance, it is the best, most colourful, most fresh English dialect on the planet." Richards has studied and explained the language's history and documented it in his new book, The Story of Australian English.

"It appeared from a process called levelling down because you had all these people who came here on 11 ships from different dialect areas, regional dialect areas across England," he said. "They all spoke differently and they used different words and what they had to do, in order to communicate with each other, was to level their dialect difference down."
Around 50 years after the colony was established, Richards said English people arriving in Australia started to claim that Australians were speaking the "purest English on