Introduction

The English language is now completing 200 years of continuous usage in Australia. In that time it has supplanted the original languages of the continent, and recruited most descendants of non-English speaking immigrants, so that today it is the overwhelmingly dominant tongue throughout Australia. Several features of the Australian situation yield a unique insight on the development and diversification of English: its geographic isolation, its social origins as a penal colony, and its recent wave of non-English speaking immigrants. Australian English (AE) has experienced language and dialect contact, but for most of the last two centuries Australia may have had the highest proportion of monolingual English speakers of any country in the world, aside from England itself. This bicentennial survey will hopefully serve to illuminate the Australian branch of ‘English around the world’ – in this case, about as far around the world as it could go.

The status of English in Australia: the national language

The status of the English language in Australia is today, and has been since British colonisation, that of the national language. It overwhelmingly dominates the linguistic landscape, both demographically and functionally. This is not to say that Australia is a monolingual country; on the contrary, a large number of languages are spoken within its borders.