In recent years we have discovered that there is much more regional variation in Australian English than hitherto suspected. The Centre’s publications Words from the Westand Tassie Termsare testament to this. Will regional words survive in the global village?

Tim Winton in Cloud Street(1991) writes: ‘There were always Pickles kids and Lamb kids up one end of the street throwing boondies or chasing someone’s dog’. Boondie is a Western Australian word meaning ‘a pebble or stone’. In other parts of Australia various words are used for the same object. In Victoria it is yonnie, and this term has spread to Tasmania, southern NSW, and parts of South Australia. In northern Victoria and southern NSW the term brinnie is also used. In northern NSW and parts of Queensland the corresponding term is gibber. Connie, from corn (elian),is an Australian term for a type of playing marble, but in northern Queensland it also developed the sense ‘a stone’. New South Wales and Queensland have another term for a small pebble or stone, and this is goolie (a term which in the mining industry is also used for a large boulder).

The word gibber is a borrowing from the Aboriginal language Dharuk, which was spoken in the Sydney region. It is also used to describe a rounded, weather-worn stone of arid inland Australia (as in the compounds gibber country and gibber plain), varying in size from very small stones to huge boulders. Boondie, yonnie, and brinnie are possibly from Aboriginal languages, but we are not certain about this. What about goolie? The Australian National Dictionarysuggests that it is also possibly from an Aboriginal language, but there is a problem with this theory because of the presence of another goolie in the English language. This is the word meaning ‘testicle’, which probably derives from a Hindustani word golimeaning ‘a bullet, ball, pill’. Both words refer to a small round object, and perhaps both go back to the Hindustani word. The problem here is that goolies in the sense ‘testicles’ would have been a taboo term earlier this century. In British dialect (Norfolk and Suffolk) there is a word gullwhich in the form gull-stonesmeans ‘a game played with rough stones as marbles’, and it is just possible that this is the origin of goolie. Our evidence indicates that all these regional terms for ‘a small stone’ are surviving.

Again in Cloud StreetWinton writes: ‘I wouldn’t have wasted pork on thisfamily, said Lester with a creasyfaced wink. Slice of polony, maybe’. Here we enter the mysterious world of the nomenclature of Australian sausages. Not the snag varieties of sausage—we are concerned here with the large sausages, sold cooked and usually in slices, and with about as much piquancy to the taste as wet blotting paper or tofu by itself, the kind of sliced meat which is the perennial standby for long-suffering children’s sandwiches. Although the various names do not refer to precisely the same items (some are blander than others) they are all certainly at the ‘blotting paper’ end of the sausage range. Polony is a Western Australian term. We suspect that it is an alteration of Bologna sausage, ‘a large smoked sausage made of bacon, veal, pork-suet and other meats, and sold ready for eating’. The Western Australian word polony is merely a pronunciational alteration of Bologna. Other Australian ‘blotting paper’ sausages, however, have been transformed as a result of political events. German sausage is a term used widely in south-east Australia, as is Strasburg, often shortened to Straz. But during the First World War anti-German feeling in Australia was vehement. Town names, even street names, with German associations, were changed. In South Australia ‘Grunthal’ was changed to ‘Verdun’, after the name of the town in France where a prolonged German offensive was repelled in 1916. ‘Germantown’ in NSW became ‘Holbrook’, in honour of Commander Norman Holbrook whose submarine sank a Turkish cruiser. In some parts of Australia the sausage suffered a similar chauvinist fate. In Tasmania, as German troops rolled into Belgium, the Tasmanians got rid of German associations from their German sausage and called it Belgium sausage instead. In the Newcastle area they started calling it Empire sausage. Unwittingly following the example of name-changing Aussie sausages, the British Royal family in 1917 changed its name from the very German Saxe-Coburg-Gothain response to the anti-German sentiments of their subjects: one and all the royals made themselves respectably British Windsors.It tickles me that Queensland followed suit with its sausages, naming their inedibles after the royals, and so the Queensland term Windsor sausage was born. At the outbreak of the War German sausage was also known as fritz, from the common nickname for a German, but this ceased in most parts of Australia, and is now used only in South Australia. Another name for ‘blotting paper’ sausage in New South Wales is devon, and this is probably the result of similar anti-Fritz sentiment. Some of these regional terms survive, but the sausages known as Belgium, Empire, and Windsor are on the endangered species list since the terms are not used by the large supermarkets. They have a lot to answer for.

Does Australian English continue to produce regional terms? In the 1970s in Sydney the term westie arose as a contemptuous epithet for a person from the Western suburbs (e.g. Blacktown or Parramatta). The Western suburbs were perceived as socially disadvantaged, and the term therefore encapsulates the class prejudice of the socially advantaged. In my Lexicon of Cadet Languagea respondent describes a westie as someone who ‘wears jeans, ugh boots, a black windcheater, with smokes kept on his arm’. Do these types exist elsewhere in Australia?

In the 1980s the term bogan became common among adolescents, and developed two senses. The first sense was popularised by the character Kylie Mole in the television series The Comedy Company.Kylie defined a bogan as ‘a person that you just don’t bother with. Someone who wears their socks the wrong way or has the same number of holes in both legs of their stockings. A complete loser’. This is the equivalent of the Australian dag or the American nerd, geek, and dork. In some parts of Australia, especially in Tasmania and Western Australia, and now in Victoria, the bogan became the equivalent of the westie. Judith Clarke in The Heroic Life of Al Capselladescribes the tupical bogan:

These terms are all Australian, providing evidence that Australian English continues to generate new words. In an article on page 6, Felicity Cox argues that the Australian accentwill hold its own because of its role in constructing an Australian identity. The same holds true for Australian words.Regional identity would seem to be almost as important as national identity in Australia (ask a Tasmanian!), so that while some regionalisms will inevitably disappear (as will some Australianisms), there is evidence that regions are continuing to generate their own distinctive terms.