A history of the English Language

say, so, beat, boot, high,
and 
how
.
18
Because an Australian’s pronunciation of 
hay
may register on an American as 
high,
or 
basin
as 
bison,
these systematic differences have been the source of misunderstandings 
between speakers of General Australian and speakers of other national varieties, though 
not among speakers of General Australian themselves. Within Australia there are possible 
difficulties in the different patterns of General Australian, the dialect of the great 
majority, and Cultivated Australian, a minority accent that approaches the received 
standard of England.
19
Social varieties such as these, and Broad Australian at the 
uncultivated extreme of the scale, are the only significant dialectal differences in a 
country where regional variations are negligible. The distinctive characteris- 
16 
E.E.Morris, 
Austral English: A Dictionary of Australasian Words, Phrases and Usages
(London, 
1898), p. xii. 
17 
Of course, this has not prevented
 kangaroo 
from gaining general currency. 
18 
For important differences with Cockney, see A.G.Mitchell, 
The Pronunciation of English in 
Australia,
rev. ed. with Arthur Delbridge (Sydney, 1965), pp. 7–8. 
19 
See A.G.Mitchell and Arthur Delbridge, 
The Speech of Australian Adolescents: A Survey
(Sydney, 1965), pp. 37, 83. 
The nineteenth century and after 301

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tics of General Australian pronunciation and the uniformity of the dialect throughout the 
continent are attributed to the circumstance that the early settlers were deported prisoners 
and adventurers often drawn from the lower classes of England (cf. § 207). Although 
detailed information about the dialects spoken by these settlers is lacking, it is clear that 
the predominant varieties were lower-class urban dialects of southeastern England. In 
Australia the constant moving of convicts from place to place brought about the 
development of a mixed dialect that became homogeneous throughout the settled territory 
and distinct from any of the British dialects that contributed to the mixture. The English 
of Australia offers an interesting example of the changes that take place in a language 
transplanted to a remote and totally different environment. 
2. 
South Africa.
The same thing is true in a somewhat different way of Africa, the most multilingual 
continent on earth. The present Republic of South Africa had been occupied successively 
by the Bushmen, Hottentots, Bantus, Portuguese, and Dutch before the English settlers 
came. From all these sources, but especially from Dutch and its South African 
development, Afrikaans, the English language has acquired elements. A few words that 
occurred earlier in peculiarly South African contexts have passed into the general English 
vocabulary. In addition to 
apartheid
and 
veldt
(or 
veld
), which retain their original 
associations, British and American speakers use 
commando
,
 commandeer
, and 
trek
in 
contexts that no longer reflect their South African history. The great majority of 
Afrikanerisms (i.e., words and expressions borrowed from Dutch and Afrikaans) would 
still be generally meaningless in other parts of the English-speaking world yet are quite 
common in the daily life of South Africans. A recently compiled list of words and 
phrases that South Africans themselves consider to be characteristic of their variety of 
English includes