AUSTRALIAN LANGUAGE

AUSTRALIAN LANGUAGE.
1. An Australian aboriginal language: ‘In no Australian language is there any word for “five”’ ( J. Fraser, The Aborigines of Australia, 1888).

2. AUSTRALIAN ENGLISH: ‘The Australian language developed during the 19th century, first mainly in the penal settlements’ ( Richard D. Lewis, ‘Let's Talk Strine’, in The Linguist, Vol. 30 No. 2, 1991).

3. Especially formerly, foul language used by Australians: ‘I tried to back the bullocks, but they scorned me utterly, in spite of the Australian language I used’ ( M. Roberts, Land Travel and Sea-Faring, 1891). See AUSTRALIAN.

AUSTRALIAN PLACE-NAMES

The place-names of Australia reflect mixed linguistic origins over some 300 years, and fall into three broad types:

1. Adoptions from Aboriginal languages

Recorded by European explorers, especially from the 1820s onward, or borrowed and somewhat Anglicized by settlers, such names are usually polysyllabic, often with sets of double letters, as in Boggabri, Gunnedah, Indooroopilly, Murrumbidgee, Tantanoola, Wollongong, and Wooloongabba. A number are reduplicative, as in Tilba Tilba, Wagga Wagga, and Woy Woy. The meanings of Aboriginal names are often uncertain: for example, the name of the Australian capital, Canberra, may mean either ‘meeting place’ or ‘woman's breasts’ (after a pair of hills).

2. Transfers and inventions by British settlers

These relate mainly to place-names in the British Isles, notable individuals, and geographical descriptions. Transferred place-names include Morpeth, Newcastle, Perth, and Windsor. Names commemorating people related either to those in Britain in earlier colonial times (who may never have seen or wanted to see Australia) such as Adelaide (after William IV's queen), Hobart (after a Secretary of State for War and the Colonies), Melbourne (after a prime minister), and Wellington (after the Duke of Wellington), or people prominent in Australia, as with Brisbane (after a governor), Lake Eyre (after an explorer), Ayers Rock (after a premier of South Australia), and Reynella (after John Reynell, who established a vineyard there).

3. Survivals from Dutch and French explorations

These include Grotte Eylandt and Rottnest straight from Dutch, and the Dutch/English hybrids Arnhem Land (after the name of a ship in turn named after a city in the Netherlands), and Van Diemen's Land (after Anthony van Diemen, a governor of the Dutch East Indies, a name duly replaced by the Anglo-Latin Tasmania, for the Dutchman explorer Abel Tasman, the first European to visit the island). Hybrid names arising out of those given by French explorers include Huon River and D'Entrecasteaux Channel, while such names as Freycinet Peninsula and La Perouse (a Sydney suburb) commemorate explorers themselves.

Terra Australis.

The name Australia is an adaptation of Latin Terra Australis, from the original terra australis incognita (‘unknown southern land’), the name for a continent that some geographers reckoned should exist to the south of Asia and Africa. Exploration established that there were in fact two distinct land masses, now known as Australia and Antarctica (‘place opposite the Arctic’). In the mid-17c, the Dutch charted the western coastline of a land mass they called New Holland, and in 1707 Captain James Cook charted what was later recognised as the eastern coastline of the same mass, to which he gave the name New South Wales. The explorer Matthew Flinders favoured the name Australia for what came to be seen as a distinct ‘new’ continent; promoted by Lachlan Macquarie, it became from the 1820s the cover term for all the British colonies throughout the continent. The wider term Australasia (‘southern Asia’), which was sometimes used for the same area, currently refers to Australia, New Zealand, and the adjacent islands of the Pacific.