Four Corners: Core speech with extras, thanks

REPORTER

Professor Arthur Delbridge, who heads the standing committee on spoken English, is co-author of a book which deals a pretty severe blow to our theories about assigning voices to States. The Pronunciation Of English In Australia says that speech differences in Australia are not distributed regionally, but rather in terms of social and personal features. It quotes a survey made in 1960 of 9,000 teenagers from more than 300 schools throughout Australia, and the only hint of regionalism they even bother to mention is this — 'South Australian students, for example, are more likely to pronounce a word like "school" with a strongly velarised and well-rounded vowel, rather like the cardinal "u".' In other words, 'schoul'. But the authors point out that 'although these features are regional, their distribution in the region is sociological.' And they say, 'They were heard most frequently in recordings from South Australian Independent schools for girls, and hardly amongst boys and girls from State schools.' Professor Delbridge leans, then, more towards the converse of the regional argument.

PROFESSOR DELBRIDGE

It's much truer to say that… that Australian English in general has a common core, with perhaps a little bit of variability out at the edges. And it's this common core which is, perhaps, more important for us. And more important to delineate.

REPORTER

Of course, the question that's left begging is why isn't there more regional speech in a country big enough to hold 20 others. Well, I talked about this with another member of committee — Professor Bill Ramson of the Australia National University.

PROFESSOR RAMSON

19th-century Australian population was a very mobile population, and most obviously because of the gold rushes, and there just wasn't time, or there weren't instances when it settled.

PRESENTER

It does seem strange, doesn't it, that in a country where you've got cities like Perth that are 2,500 miles away from another city, that they wouldn't develop regional dialects, even modern ones?

PROFESSOR RAMSON

Yes, they're a long way away, but aeroplanes get there very quickly, and so do a set of radio and television programs.

PRESENTER

And Professor Ramson takes the argument a stage further. Not only are the States not so individual, but perhaps the whole Australian language was less original than we thought.

PAUL HOGAN

And you've got a 'Hogan', who's supposed to be a typical sort of Australian ocker.

PROFESSOR RAMSON

'Ocker' is a mystery. I know there have been a number of views put forward about its origin in the press recently. One I heard which is… appeals to me at the moment is that people whose surname was O'Connor were all, in primary school, known as 'Ocker'. But I don't know whether you want to generalise about the O'Connors.

A bearded man in a hat, outdoors.

MAN

Oh, no, I just thought about it for a while. But I'm not sure whether he's fair dinkum.

PROFESSOR RAMSON

If my memory serves me right, it was a… it was recorded as a Lincolnshire dialect word… in the sense of hard work and hours, hard dinkum. And then the Australia sense which… the more common Australian sense which derives from that.

OLD MAN

Have the swag over here. The swag always hangs down that-a-way. If you see a swag across, he's a new chum. The swag hangs out and down.

PROFESSOR RAMSON

'Swag' comes out of criminal cant. It's recorded in James Hardy Vaux's 1812 glossary of Australian prison slang, so that it was a part of the prison slang of London, and then of the convicts that were brought out. It was their bag of booty, and it developed its Australian sense from that.