“our own familiar English”: A historical sociolinguistic study of the shaping of Australian English through the lens of Western Australia

Most description of the history of Australian English has assumed a starting point at the first arrival of transported convicts in eastern Australia in 1788, with a new English variety subsequently diffusing across the continent. This thesis finds novel insights on how the variety may have been shaped in the unique language ecology of ‘the West’—prior to its population quadrupling with the gold rush of the mid 1890s. A typical sociolinguistic analysis of colonial texts combined with a close reading of historiography—a microhistory approach—enables a different understanding of features in the context of complex social and historical forces at play.