2024 marks 60 years since the publication of Donald Horne’s influential book The Lucky Country. Most people read the title as a compliment, but he originally intended the book as a wake-up call to Australians about our complacency and our embrace of a provincial reliance, first on Britain and later, on America.
When the book was written, Australians were overwhelmingly white and English-speaking. In 1964, 95% of the country claimed British ancestry. Fast forward 60 years, and the composition of Australia’s population has changed considerably, especially in its largest cities. Thanks to changing waves of migration, first from southern Europe and more recently from Asia and Africa, Australians look and sound very different from their peers in the year Horne’s book was published.
Horne explored many facets of Australian culture in The Lucky Country, but he didn’t delve into the impact of the language diversity resulting from this migration—no doubt because assimilation was in vogue and English was (and is) the dominant language.
Nowadays, alongside Australia’s many Indigenous languages, English co-exists with an increasingly diverse range of home and community languages – Arabic, Chinese, Greek, Punjabi, Vietnamese, just to name a few.
More than words — language is identity
For many Australians, speaking more than one language is part of who they are, and maintaining a community language builds their sense of belonging in Australia while simultaneously connecting them with their heritage and ancestral homelands.
A young Greek Australian man we interviewed as part of an ongoing project in Melbourne captures this connection succinctly:
“Here being in Australia, obviously the mindset is obviously the English language is a lot more important … but my parents also found it really important for me to have that cultural identity and have that connection to my Greek background, which is why they decided to also allow me to learn a second language, which was the Greek language.”
Another participant, a middle-aged Italian Australian woman, said she uses Italian to connect with her clients:
“98% of my days with people I speak English, but if at work, I go to a client’s house and I’ll pick up that they’re Italian, then I can break into Italian, I’ll actually say something in Italian to let them know I can speak Italian, yeah, and maybe they feel more comfortable.”
But even if you don’t speak a language other than English, the (unconscious) choices you make when you speak let other people know how you see yourself. And, just as importantly, influence how other people see you.
When Australian English started being studied systematically in the middle of the last century researchers noted that, while it lacks the regional differences (‘dialects’) heard in the UK, Australians can indicate social status by shifting between accents that are more ‘cultivated’ or ‘more broad’. And, they found that languages other than English also changed the form and sound of Australia’s distinctive English.
In the early 1980s, linguists like Barbara Horvath and Michael Clyne AM FAHA FASSA drew attention to differences in the English spoken by second-generation Australians from different backgrounds (German, Greek, Italian). Where ‘dialect’ describes regional differences in ways of speaking, we call these differences according to background ‘ethnolects’.
Ethnolects & what it means to ‘sound’ Australian
Ethnolects are now frequent features of media commentary, sometimes favourably, but often not. Because of their association with migrants and their descendants, our first reaction might be to look on ethnolects as a ‘broken’ form of English, remnants of the imperfect language learning efforts of the first generation. But current research shows that sustained differences between speakers from different ethnic backgrounds are often influenced by factors other than their ethnicity or home language.
The Sydney Speaks project, directed by Catherine Travis FAHA at the Australian National University’s ARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language, found that social class impacts how Sydneysiders speak more than their ethnic background.
The ARC-funded Voices of Sydney project, directed by Felicity Cox FAHA at Macquarie University, found that children and teenagers in more culturally diverse suburbs of Sydney were more likely to pick up ongoing changes in Australian English than those from less diverse suburbs, regardless of their ethnic or linguistic background.
Any child who grows up in Australia will learn Australian English, but a child who also learns an ethnolect can shift between ways of speaking English, just as any Aussie can switch between more cultivated or more broad speech. So, instead of looking on ethnolects as a deficiency, we should think of them as a bonus — like being able to speak another language.
For those children and grandchildren of migrants who haven’t maintained their community language, the ethnolect is especially important for providing connection to community and heritage. The people we’ve interviewed in various communities in Melbourne commented that they speak differently from the ‘mainstream’, but most were at a loss to identify the precise features of their English that make this difference.
This puzzle led me to conduct a study with colleagues at the University of Melbourne, where we asked a random selection of Australians if they could identify someone’s background after listening to a short voice clip. We found that listeners were not very good at identifying background – they answered correctly less than half of the time. Also, if they believed that the person was from a more recent wave of migration, like Chinese or Indian (even if they weren’t), the listener was more likely to say that the person speaking was not from Australia and didn’t speak English well. This study suggests that ethnolects are largely based on perceptions of difference.
Multiculturalism, which was adopted years after Horne’s book came out, gives us the opportunity to put together different parts of who we are (culture, religion, food) while remaining Australian. Multilingualism and ethnolects are the linguistic parts of this merging of social identities that is part and parcel of Australia in the 21st century. Instead of seeing these new ways of speaking Australian English as problems or deviations, we can celebrate them as part of the expanding definition of what it means to be Australian.
55th Annual Academy Symposium
Professor James Walker FAHA will appear on the panel ‘Talk & taboo’ at the 55th Annual Academy Symposium ‘The ideas and ideals of Australia: The Lucky Country turns sixty’ on 14 & 15 November 2024.
