Background to the Australian survey

A pilot study on regional variation in the lexicon of Australian English (Bryant 1985) found clearly defined usage regions in Australia, namely, Western Australia, south-east South Australia, the Victorian usage region which included Tasmania and part of southern New South Wales, and New South Wales and Queensland (which form a fairly homogeneous region). The borders of these regions do not coincide with the State borders. The evidence for regional variation in Australia was sufficiently strong to warrant a full-scale survey.

This chapter reports an innovative methodology necessitated by constraints of time and money as well as by conditions peculiar to Australia. It covers the first two stages of the full-scale survey, making comparisons with surveys done in other countries, and examines some early results.

The Australian survey compares most closely with the United States surveys, as conditions in Australia are more like those in the United States than elsewhere. For example, both have fairly recent European settlement, with the first settlers drawn from the same country, comparable geographical size, and larger usage regions than in other countries. Chambers and Trudgill (1980: 108) note that ‘in more recently settled regions, like inland North America and Australia, it is becoming apparent that dialect features tend to be shared over relatively great distances when the settlement history goes back only one or two centuries’.