British Dialect
British dialects were an important source of Australian words in the
nineteenth century. About 200 words, from a range of British dialects,
lost their ‘dialect’ status in Australian and became part
of mainstream Australian English. There are two interesting features
about these dialect borrowings. First, most of the important borrowings
occur in the second 60 years of settlement. Secondly, many of the words
borrowed come from the dialects of northern England and Scotland.
Surprisingly, there are few borrowings from Ireland. The Irish made
up the second largest group of immigrants to Australia in the nineteenth
century. For example, in the period 1847–1872, 35 per cent of
total assisted emigrants were Irish, and over the period 1840–1914,
over 300,000 Irish emigrated to Australia (James Jupp, The Australian
People, 1988: 58, 560). But on the available evidence, Irish is
under-represented in Australian English. It is likely that it has much
to do with social and religious factors: most of the Irish emigrants
were Catholic, their levels of literacy were low, and there was significant
prejudice against them from the convict period right through the nineteenth
century (and beyond).
Many of the early terms have to do with agriculture, land settlement,
and mining, and they may well not have been spread evenly through the
language of colonial society. Indeed, most of the mining terms in the
period would have been restricted to areas where there were Cornish
miners, especially in South Australia. The significant borrowings from
British dialect are concentrated in the second 60 years of settlement.
They include:
nugget (1851)
fossick (1852)
lolly (sense 1b) (1854)
chook (1855)
mullock (1855)
skite (1857)
shanghai (noun) (1863)
eye (in phrase pick the eyes out of)
(1865)
dag (1867)
larrikin (1868)
barrack (1878)
rouseabout (1881)
derry (in phrase have a derry on)
(1883)
soursob (see soursop sense 2) (1885)
little house (1886)
kip (1887)
crib (noun 7) (1890)
cronk (1890)
gig, 5 (1891)
nark (1891)
bowyang (1893)
stoush (1893)
smoodge (1898)
wowser (1899)
