Ana Isabel Bordas del Prado.

Brief Story of Australia.

There is a big influence into Australian English from London forms of speech, for the reason that
Australian accent owes a lot to Cockney accent, spoken in London.
Australia was firstly inhabited by Aborigine tribes, who spoke hundreds of languages.
Then, this land was discovered by Dutch navigators in the 17th century; however, James Cook charted
the previously unexplored eastern coast and claimed it for the British Crown.
In 1786, the British Government decided to establish penal colonies, the first in Sidney, New South
Wales, and criminals were sent to them. The fact is that one third of the convicts spoke Cockney
English, one of the most influential forms of English in the story.
Cockney is an accent dialect that was born during the Victorian times, in Londons East End,
traditionally the home of poverty and crime. It was the language of street vendors and flower sellers, of
slum-dwellers, of the working class, of poor people. Now, is the accent of Londoners, and has
influenced more or less ten million people in and around London.
In 1829, Britain annexed the whole of Australia, and soon private colonisations began. The settlers
drove the Aborigines almost to extinction, as their languages, although Pidgin English was used
between Aborigines and convicts.
The fact that the climate was particularly good for sheep-farming and beef-raising attracted waves of
farmers to the inland plains and the immense northern regions, and although convict transportation to
eastern Australia ceased in 1840, new gold discoveries produced another surge of free migration,
workers and free colonists, spreading English throughout all the territory.
The six Australian colonies gained self-government status between 1855 and 1890, and then joined
the Commonwealth of Australia in 1901. Finally, with the Statute of Westminster achieved the
complete independence with New Zealand.
Some marks of Australian speech are the pronunciation of the h, the lack of glottal stop, the different
pronunciation of the vowels caused by a smaller opening of the mouth, the different pronunciation of
some diphthongs, or not to front the / / and / / to /f / and /v/, etc.
In the English of Australia have occurred inevitable adaptations to the new realities, but today it
has become quite influential in the world.