A swampful of quackers: reimagining Australian English dialect formation

Since the turn of the 21st century the history of English in Australia has been sketched from a range of perspectives (e.g. Burridge, 2020; Fritz, 2004; Kiesling, 2006; Leitner, 2004), all of them assuming a ‘ground zero’ at the arrival of the first convict ships on the east coast in 1788, followed by diffusion of an evolving variety across the continent. With this orientation, Schneider (2007) has mapped out his language ecology-based five-phase model of post-colonial English evolution against a broad sweep of Australian history, suggesting Phase 3 nativisation to start with the nation’s Federation in 1901, and Phase 4 endonormative stabilisation to be triggered by the so-called ‘Event X’ of the political implications of the fall of Singapore to the Japanese in 1942 (2007: 122-123).

If we sustain the metaphor of ‘language ecology’, then Schneider’s modelling gives us a distant, somewhat fuzzy view of a large-scale ecosystem. A closer look at local environs might reveal more nuanced and complex processes at work. Accordingly, this study zeroes in on a location and temporal span rarely considered in linguistic research, the remote outpost of Western Australia in the 19th century, where a somewhat different Australian English origin story was unfolding. For its first 60 years this ‘hermit colony’ (Harris, 1933) was one of the smallest, most isolated English-speaking populations in the world. A close read of ego-documents written by two sisters born in the tiny colony in the 1860s and 1870s invites further analysis: in particular, questions are provoked about historic orthographic representations of a region-specific loan-word (quaka/quacker/quokka). Further investigation in turn reveals some surprising possibilities regarding phonological influence from, or confluence with, Irish English—evident, for example, in the lower placement of the LOT vowel that may be inferred from the italicised spellings in the two excerpts below—and may indicate that processes of endonormative stabilisation were under way much earlier in the 20th century, well before Schneider’s suggested timing of the Second World War.

Examples

(1) got a lot of quakas in the potatoes Swamp with gun & dog (EA, female, b. 1861)
(2) over that log those Quackers were going. (BK, female, b. 1874/5)

References

Burridge, Kate (2020). History of Australian English. In Willoughby, L. & Manns, H. (Eds.), Australian English Reimagined. Oxford: Routledge. 175-192.
Fritz, Clemens (2004). From Plato to Aristotle-Investigating Early Australian English. Australian journal of linguistics 24(1): 57-97.
Harris, Merab (1933). British migration to Western Australia, 1829-1850. Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of London, 1933.
Kiesling, Scott F. (2006). English in Australia and New Zealand. Comparing World Englishes: A Research Guide. Blackwell. 58-73.
Leitner, Gerhard (2004). Australia's Many Voices. Teil 1, Australian English - The National Language. Berlin ;: De Gruyter Mouton.
Schneider, Edgar W. (2007). Postcolonial English: Varieties around the World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.