Lexicology. Different dialects and accents of English, Детальна інформація

Similar examples, though perhaps fewer in number, such as boomerang, dingo, kangaroo are all adopted into the English language through its

Australian variant. They denote the new phenomena found by English immigrants on the new continent. A high percentage of words borrowed from the native inhabitants of Australia will be noticed in the sonorous

Australian place names.

Otherwise an ample use was made of English lexical material. An intense development of cattle breeding in new conditions necessitated the creation of an adequate terminology. It is natural therefore that nouns like stock, bullock or land find a new life on Australian soil: stockman

'herdsman', stockyard, stock-keeper 'the owner of the cattle'; bullock v means 'to work hard', bullocky dray is a dray driven by bullocks; an inlander is a stock-keeper driving his stock from one pasture to another, overland v is 'to drive cattle over long distances'; to punch a cow 'to conduct a team of oxen'; a puncher 'the man who conducts a team of oxen'; tucker-bag 'the bag with provision'.

The differences described in the present chapter do not undermine our understanding of the English vocabulary as a balanced system. It has been noticed by a number of linguists that the British attitude to this phenomenon is somewhat peculiar. When anyone other than an Englishman uses

English, the natives of Great Britain, often half-consciously, perhaps, feel that they have a special right to criticize his usage because it is

"their" language. It is, however, unreasonable with respect to people in the Vfiited States, Canada, Australia and some other areas for whom English is their mother-tongue. Those who think that the Americans must look to the

British for a standard are wrong and, vice versa, it is not for the

American to pretend that English in Great Britain is inferior to the

English he speaks. At present there is no single "correct" English and the

American, Canadian and Australian English have developed standards of their own.

Conclusion

I. English is the national language of England proper, the USA,

Australia and some provinces of Canada. It was also at different times imposed on the inhabitants of the former and present British colonies and. protectorates as well as other Britain- and US-dominated territories, where the population has always stuck to its own mother tongue.

II. British English, American English and Australian English are variants of the same language, because they serve all spheres of verbal communication. Their structural pecularities, especially morphology, syntax and word-formation, as well as their word-stock and phonetic system are essentially the same. American and Australian standards are slight modifications of the norms accepted in the British Isles. The status of

Canadian English 'has not yet been established.

III. The main lexical differences between the variants are caused by the lack of equivalent lexical units in one of them, divergences in the semantic structures of polysemantic words and peculiarities of usage of some words on different territories.

e. by a literary standard with a proportion of local dialect features.

V. The so-called local dialects in the British Isles and in the USA are used only by the rural population and only for the purposes of oral communication. In both variants local distinctions are more marked in pronunciation, less conspicuous in vocabulary and insignificant in grammar.

VI. Local variations in the USA are relatively small. What is called by tradition American dialects is closer in nature to regional variants of the national literary language.