Australian- Values PDF

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Information about Australian values and how these influence the language used...

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AUSTRALIAN CULTURAL VALUES Australia is often characterised as being fair, equal, laidback, egalitarian and hospitable. Australia is also known as having a ‘classless’ society – what this means is that we don’t value the upper class as much as say America or Britain does, and in fact our lexicon and accents collectively reflect this! As Samuel Johnson (famous 18th century English author) once stated, “Language is the dress of thought”, and in many ways Australian English reflects this. Below I list some examples for Australian cultural values. Australian Value Fairness, equality Laidback Egalitarian

Lexical/Phrasal Examples “Fair shake of the sauce bottle” Swear words (e.g. Fuck, shit etc.) “No worries” “Tradie” as opposed to “tradesman”

Australia became an egalitarian society because people who were treated as second class citizens refused to accept that they were in any way inferior. This refusal to accept inferiority greatly differentiates Australia from its eastern hemisphere neighbours, where hierarchical thinking prevails. Englishman George Bennett wrote in 1834, ''the English spoken is very pure, and it is easy to recognise a person from home or one born in the colony, no matter what class of society''. This egalitarian belief is also reflected in diminutives (little shortened words), such as tradie, servo, cabbie and so forth. Can you think of any others? Compare tradesman and tradie? Both mean the same thing, but which one sounds friendlier, more egalitarian and equal? Tradie makes the professional tradesman seem as though you are on the same ‘class’ level as him, as opposed to tradesman. As psycholinguistic Nenagh Kemp from the University of Tasmania once stated, “Australians who use these diminutives might be trying to sound less pretentious, more casual and friendlier than they would by using the full words”. Our values of hospitableness as well as equality are also shown in the various ethnic backgrounds in Australian society. We are known to be very multicultural, and the ethnic lexicon reflects this. Just think of how many foreign words there are in Melbourne, such as Yum Cha and so forth.

Recommend reading: http://www.convictcreations.com/culture/egalitarianism.html...