ABSTRACT
The past two centuries have witnessed greater changes in the structure of the speech-community, of the audience and experience of English-speakers, than any period in the history of any language. The community is of unprecedented size (cf. § 13), and the language has developed a unique role in the world. Marckwardt (1958, 172) quotes an estimate that three-quarters of the world's mail is in English. More important than the size of the figures is the spread of English-speakers over the continents - only South America lacks a large community of people for whom English is the first language. This extension naturally brings variation in its train, as studies of English in America, Australasia and elsewhere have repeatedly stressed (see note on p. 76). The variation is superficially obvious in vocabulary, especially in the naming of plants, animals, topographical features, customs and institutions. But it has equally important covert features. Australian English, spoken in a country of nearly 3m square miles, and even American English, in a country of over 3fm square miles, are notoriously more uniform than English English, spoken in an area of just over 50,000 square miles. For the most extreme case, that of Australia, this is particularly relevant for our purposes; since, though the first English was spoken in Australia in 1688, Cook's first major exploration dates from 1770. G. W. Turner (1966) writes:
The homogeneity of Australian English is remarkable. It would be difficult to find elsewhere a geographical area so large with so little linguistic variation. The same accent is heard through widely different climates and there is little variation in vocabulary. Even if we include New Zealand, differences are hardly more marked than those found within the eastern United States (163).
The relative uniformity is accounted for by several factors, notably the tendency to explore the interior from urban coastal bases, whose speech remained a norm, high mobility from the early days of settlement, social insecurity leading to linguistic conformity (with strong influence from the literary language), and the mixed dialect origins of early settlers, which would tend to favour the dropping of noticeably local and restricted usages (Turner, 10-15). The mobility factor needs to be broken down further. In the earliest days it refers to a nomadic way of life. But it is linguistically relevant that hard on the heels of extended inland settlement followed the first of the modern aids to speed in travel the steamship and the railway. Moreover, the extreme smallness of the population militated against the formation of subgroups - in 1834 the population was only about 36,000, and 'new chums' felt a strong pressure to conform. In part this pressure derived from each new arrival's sense of joining a group-Australian or New Zealand; if the first English-speakers in England had such a sense, it related to a much smaller group. English had a history of several centuries in this country before the speaker's self-identification was with a national rather than a locally restricted community (cf. §210).