English in Exile: Cockney, Australian English y la Evolución del Inglés Estándar

What does the narrator mean when he says that what this tape deals with is the story of “English in exile”?

Because this tape explains how the Australian indigenes adopted their own languages to the Cockney accent of London. That is to say, during the exile of many London inhabitants who spoke the Cockney accent, many of them went to Australia, and the indigenous people of there, dealing with many conflicts which brought them near to extinction, had to adopt some of the Cockney features.

2. Mention some London’s East End language during the 19th century.

In the 19th century, large numbers of the working people in and around London left for Australia, New Zealand, Southern Africa, and even the Falkland Islands. To this day, these accents of English share a strong family likeness. In Victorian times the London language was used by Sam Weller in Dickens’s Pickwick Papers. It was the language of London street vendors and flower sellers, the most famous of whom was Eliza Doolittle in Shaw’s Pygmalion. It was—and is—one of the most influential forms of English in our story… and is the accent known around the world as Cockney.

3. Where does the word Cockney come from? What did it mean? What kind of people did speak it? Do these speakers have any special linguistic connotation nowadays? Has it anything to do with slang? Was it influenced by any language or accent? Did it have any influence on Australian English?

The word Cockney is said to have come from the Middle Ages, from two Middle English words which mean a “cock’s egg”, and a cock’s egg was an inferior and worthless little thing that sometimes appeared. In short, the Cockney was “a runt, a pampered person”, too.

Cockney speech was scorned as bad, slovenly, or slang. For outsiders, Cockneys were cheeky rascals with hearts of gold and a song on their lips. The Cockneys were a classic English working-class stereotype, though almost nothing authentic was known about them or their language. Cockney has spread beyond the East End and is heard throughout London, some of the broadest from costermongers and barrow-boys.

In the middle of the 19th century Cockney became a back slang, used as a secret language by traders and costermongers. Instead of saying somebody’s fat, you say taf. Yob is the best known of all the back slang words; the most persistent one, it simply means a boy.

What we call Cockney speech today, in its backbone, was the speech of the citizens of London. Not necessarily the lower-order, but citizens of all classes, except probably the Court. Now Cockney was treated, not as another variety of English like Scots or Yorkshire, but as bad, inferior, and slovenly.

Cockneys account for more than one third of the original generation of Australians. In Australia, unlike England or America, from Perth to Sydney, there is roughly speaking only one kind of accent. In fact, Australian is the most classless form of English in the world, part Cockney, part Irish, part Standard English.

4. Say all you know about Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language and its influence on the speech of 18th-century England.

Until the 18th century, there was virtually no formal guidance about the proper spelling and pronunciation of English. The language was in such a state of flux that writers like Jonathan Swift proposed an academy to regulate it. It was not until Johnson started work on his dictionary in this house that what we now know as Standard English began to emerge. Before Dr. Johnson, writers like Jonathan Swift warned that English was being corrupted, as they put it, by change. Johnson, a man who raised common sense to the heights of genius, scorned the idea of permanence in language. To believe in that, he said, was to believe in the elixir of eternal life. Yet paradoxically, the work that was done in this house gave the language its first stabilizing authority, and it is an important milestone in the history of English. The two volumes of Johnson’s dictionary linked spoken English to a printed standard. Now the educated middle class learned to speak like the dictionary and scorned the illiterate Cockneys, who did not. The dictionary’s 40,000 definitions provided the basis of Standard English, and its influence has lasted to this day.

5. Mention and explain some Aborigine words assimilated into Australian English. And also on New Zealand English.

Some elements of Aboriginal languages have been incorporated into Australian English, mainly as names for places, flora and fauna (for example dingo, kangaroo). Beyond that, few terms have been adopted into the wider language, except for some localised terms or slang. Some examples are cooee and hard yakka. The former is a high-pitched call (pronounced /kuːi/) which travels long distances and is used to attract attention. Cooee has also become a notional distance: if he's within cooee, we'll spot him. Hard yakka means hard work and is derived from yakka, from the Yagara/Jagara language once spoken in the Brisbane region. Also from the Brisbane region comes the word bung, meaning broken. A failed piece of equipment might be described as having “bunged up” or referred to as “on the bung” or “gone bung”. Bung is also used to describe an individual who is pretending to be hurt; such an individual is said to be “bunging it on”.

Though often thought of as an Aboriginal word, didgeridoo (a well-known wooden musical instrument) is probably an onomatopoeic word of Western invention. It has also been suggested that it may have an Irish derivation.

6. The narrator of the tape says that Australian speech is “the most classless form of English in the world”. What does this mean? What are the cultural and sociological implications of such a statement?

Australian English is the most classless form of English in the world because it has part Cockney, part Irish, and part Standard English. It has a proud and egalitarian toughness. What’s more, judged by speech alone, workers and bosses, sheep shearers and property owners are all virtually indistinguishable. Today some 90% of all Australians speak with unashamed Australian accents. But there is still an echo from colonial days: a minority still speak what is known as “cultivated Australian”, the closest variety to the standard middle-class speech of England.

7. What is the “public school accent” synonymous with in England? Is there any similar attribution in American English?

By Victorian times, accent and class were becoming synonymous. Speech, education, and advancement went together. To guarantee good English, and a good future, parents would send their children away to school. The English public schools took boys from all over the country and gave them a Standard accent. With the right accent, the educated middle class became captains of industry, army and navy officers, imperial civil servants, lawyers, politicians, and even teachers who would pass their accents on to the next generation.

By the 1960s the public school accent had become universally the English of radio communicators and television interviewers.

But many people say that public schools should be abolished because they have produced snobs. The public school accent is seen as synonymous with class distinction.

8. What is the “Mojo”? Has it any significance for Australian culture and/or Australian Standard English?

One champion of the Australian voice with no worries about inferiority is Alan Morrison. With his partner, Alan Morrison, he set up Mojo, the first advertising agency to take the radical step of shooting all its commercials in Australian English. They began speaking on television, in commercials, in a language that belonged to the people. Everybody could understand them. Advertisers like Mojo were responding to something in the wind: a new confidence in Australia’s own distinctive brand of English, evident in the thriving film industry. Films like Picnic at Hanging Rock, Gallipoli, and My Brilliant Career have not only won worldwide acclaim, they have given Australia’s voice a hearing in cities like New York and London.

9. What elements of cultural snobbery does Barry Humphries satirize in his native Australia? How does he illustrate it?

Barry Humphries satirizes Australian issues through his characters, like Dame Edna or Sir Les Patterson. These characters are supposed to be some kind of “Australian cultural attaché”. Sir Les parodies the typical ocker, the broadest Australian speech and behaviour. Everyone goes along with the joke. Australia’s ABC went live when he launched his latest record and book.

Australian English abounds in ripe, comic similes. Humphries loves phrases like: “a kangaroo loose in the top paddock” for a “crazy person”; “as scarce as rocking horse manure”; “as happy as a bastard on father’s day”; “a veranda over the toy shop” for “a paunch”; and “hanging around like a fort in a phone box”.

10. Do names such as Keneally, Moorehouse, White and Carey suggest anything to you? In connection with what? Have they won real recognition?

These authors helped build confidence in the Australian language around the world. Many of their books were adapted to the cinema and achieved great recognition.

Thomas Keneally was known as “Mick” until 1964 but began using the name Thomas when he started publishing, in the hope that family would be less able to identify him as the author. He is perhaps most famous for his Schindler’s Ark, which won the Booker Prize and is the basis of the film Schindler’s List. Many of his novels are reworkings of historical material, although modern in their psychology and style.

Frank Moorehouse is a writer of short stories, screenplays and novels. He won the 2001 Miles Franklin Award for Dark Palace, the second in his series of novels about the League of Nations. His first short story was published in Southerly in 1957. During the 1960s, Moorhouse was associated with the Sydney Push, a progressive group of artists, writers, intellectuals and drinkers. He did not write a full-length novel until Forty-Seventeen, which won The Age Book of the Year Award and the Australian Literature Society’s Gold Medal.

Patrick White is widely regarded as one of the greatest English-language novelists of the 20th century. His writings make great use of the stream of consciousness technique. His first book, The Ploughman and Other Poems, was published in 1935. His mature works include twelve novels, two short story collections, plays and non-fiction. He was awarded the 1973 Nobel Prize in Literature.

Peter Carey attended the prestigious Geelong Grammar School. He wrote advertising copy in the early days of his literary career. He also collaborated on the screenplay of the film Until the End of the World. Currently, he is director of the Creative Writing Master of Fine Arts program at Hunter College, part of the City University of New York.