Beyond Mitchell's Views on the History of Australian English

Research on Australian English, as on new varieties of English generally, has been concerned with these questions: (i) where did the input come from, especially from which region in Great Britain and Ireland; (ii) when did the English transplanted acquire distinct features; and (iii) what was the formative role of social or other layers of the population in stratifying the new variety? However, research assumes without much discussion that new varieties of English can be explained as a local process away from a set of transplanted varieties of English and that they are, possibly, enriched by the effects of language contact in the country. This paper reviews Mitchell's ideas on the history of Australian English critically, enlarges the perspective to the dialect and contact and makes some quite radical revisions. I will propose that Australian English has undergone, at least, two processes of transplantation.

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