preview

Australian Identity Essay

Decent Essays
Open Document

There is a range of langauge varieties that exist in contemporary Australian society and all contribute to a shared national identity. Undeniably, there is also an accompanying range of attitudes towards them. Discuss.

In order to separate ourselves from Britain and America, Australians actively maintain an identity and a culture that holds values like ‘mateship,’ ‘relaxedness,’ and ‘egalitarianism,’ and this is predominantly maintained through the Broad Australian accent. Australians have their own variety of suffixations and shortenings, giving ‘mates’ nicknames like ‘Stevo,’ and possessing our own venerated and idiosyncratic lexicon, which some refer to as ‘dingo lingo.’ While this aspect of Austrlian culture is only accepted on the right …show more content…

Rife with elision, assimilation and extended vowel sounds, this accent is both associated with friendliness and a relaxed temperament, and encapsulates this constructed Australian identity entirely, on the right person. Typically middle aged men who ‘have a stubby’ after work, and are relatively self-made, who work hard and barrack for their favored footy team just the same as the next man, are the ones who are allowed to have this accent, and hold these friendly connotations. While it seems that ‘dole bludgers,’ or more typical ‘bogans,’ are not. Similarly, women who possess such an accent, tend to be viewed as ‘uneducated’ and ‘not likely to be in positions of power.’ Julia Gillard during her time as Prime Minister. Gillard’s Broad Accent, while supposedly embodying all that Australians love about Australia, was rejected and ridiculed. The same accent previous Prime Minister Bob Hawke had, who closed social distance with his audience and appeared to be warm and trustworthy, was rejected when a woman used it. Thus this ultimately suggests that certain individuals only accept the Broad accent, and the negative ‘bogan’ stereotypes associated with it are only ever brought up when the individual is undesirable in the eyes of the …show more content…

Aboriginal English due to its non-standard nature and the formation of sentences, many Australians dub those who speak this creole as being ‘uneducated,’ and view the language in a negative light. Aboriginal Australians have an distinctive way of speaking, the articles ‘an’ and ‘a’ are often omitted, and base forms of verbs are often used in any context, rather than ‘I painted the wall’ it would become, ‘I paint the wall,’ and along with its own morphological differences, such as ‘brudda’ for ‘brother’ and a lexicon entirely separate from the standard many reject Aboriginal English entirely. Australia has only adopted nouns from Aboriginal languages, place names and other minor aspects of Aboriginal culture, things that add to the nations outward quirkiness, giving Aboriginal langauges and culture a tokenistic quality in the eyes of non-indigenous Australia. Thus, while these variants of Australian English act as another nod toward a notion of multiculturalism that Austrlia endorses as something it actively practices, its rejection in certain circles is also indicative of the racism

Get Access
Related
Get Access