Bruce Moore (ed.)
Who's Centric Now?
The Present State of Post-Colonial Englishes
OUP, $29.95pb, 328pp, 0 19 551 450 9

Julia Robinson (ed.)
Voices of Queensland:
Words from the Sunshine State
OUP, $26.95pb, 200pp, 0 19 551 395 9

Susan Butler
Dinkum Dictionary:
The Origins of Australian Words
Text, $19.95pb, 214pp, 1 876485 85 X

BESIDES ITS ORIGINAL SENSE — to kill, to deal a blow to (1930s+) — the OED lists a further seven slang senses that zap has acquired in the last forty years (the latest, from the 1980s, to fast-forward a video or to channel-surf, in order to avoid advertisements). Singaporean English adds another — to photocopy. In a nice metaphor, Singaporeans also call someone who plays gooseberry a lamp-post. In Hong Kong and Sydney (and maybe in Singapore and elsewhere), Asian gays call one of their number who relates sexually only or chiefly with other Asians sticky-rice, while one who goes only for Caucasians is a potato-queen (the semantic as well as culinary antithesis of the Caucasian rice-queen). No English-speaker can keep up with lexical growth in their language. New words and senses crop up in too many places.

English, despite its manifest unsuitability in many respects for the task, had become, by the end of the twentieth century, the most used language of international communication. It is the world or global language. Yet we often overlook that it is spoken as the native language (the mother tongue or L1 in linguistic speak) in only six countries: the UK, Ireland, the USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, all of them former colonies of the first. In a seventh country, which has rejoined the British Commonwealth and which has eleven official languages, it has the same `native' standing, although it is the mother tongue of only nine per cent of South Africans (nineteen per cent speak Afrikaans).

A number of contributors to Who's Centric Now? (the proceedings of a conference organised by the Australian National Dictionary Centre at ANU) state that there are already far more second-language and foreign-language speakers of English (some of whom have native or near-native fluency) than there are native speakers, and they are beginning to demand that native speakers learn to appreciate their needs and at least give credit for the considerable efforts they have made to acquire a language that is difficult to learn to speak well. The questions the conference's title addresses are: Who now owns the language? Who sets the standards?

When the writing of the OED began in earnest in the late 1870s, these questions did not exist. The language to be recorded in the most thorough and insightful manner yet achieved was the cultivated or educated language of southern England, what would later be known as Received English. It was the language that the editor had used in his book on the language of the Lowland Scots, which got him the job; James Murray was himself a Scot, but it had been decided a century before in the Scotch Enlightenment that Scots like himself, addressing the English-speaking public, would use the standard English of England. The OED would record variations from that standard — dialect, technical jargon, slang, and so on — but the core of the dictionary would be that language.

As far as the formal written language (the language used, for example, in this review) is concerned, the compact still obtains, more or less. What I write here is the lineal descendant of that language and can be understood by any educated English-speaker anywhere, and indeed nothing in the language so far betrays that the writer is in fact Australian. There is an international written standard, which, as Tom McArthur, the editor of English Today (one of three journals devoted to English) and of The Oxford Companion to the English Language, points out in his opening address to the conference, has two subvarieties: British and US. The Commonwealth countries largely follow the British standard, in Canada expressly to differentiate their English from that of their southern neighbours, as Katherine Barber points out in her essay on Canadian English (so in the late-nineteenth century they adopted -our spellings and renamed the last letter of the alphabet zed).

It is when one comes to the informal, spoken language that the difficulties arise. Mutual intelligibility can be a real problem, especially for speakers with limited exposure to other varieties (Americans, for example, as opposed to Australians, who, because of the television and film they are raised on, are polydialectal). Several of the speakers at the Canberra conference addressed the question of demotic speech, specifically in relation to setting standards for Indian or Singapore-Malaysian English-speakers. Murray would have considered other varieties like US or Australian as dialects of English, but because of its hierarchical implications that word has now largely fallen out of discourse about English in favour of the more neutral term variety. Nationalism was and is a big factor in the shift of thinking. Already in the 1790s, Noah Webster was talking of the `American tongue', and his `corrected' spellings were intended to make that tongue different from that of the British (without, however, sacrificing mutual comprehensibility). When the Scots made a dictionary of their variety (the collecting began in 1907 and the publication started in 1929), it was called, almost defiantly one might think, the Scottish National Dictionary.

Whatever their scientific pretensions, linguists are complicit in this nationalism, as is evident in several of the contributions to Who's Centric Now?, and seek to maximise the differences of their variety. Each variety now aspires to have its own dictionary, not just of the localisms but of the whole language. The editor of the new Oxford Canadian Dictionary (1998) confesses to a certain pleasure, not unconnected with nationalism, in the frequency with which the label Canadian recurs; it is evidence that `we do exist!'

Nationalism is an important force, too, in the language policies of decolonised countries, and English as the colonial language gets caught up in politics of seeking to establish nationhood. As Banu and Sussex point out, Bangladesh seeks to promote the use of Bengali (or Bangla, its new de-anglicised name) as the national language. However, most of the country's laws are written in English (often there exists no Bengali translation), and the superior courts hear cases and give judgments in English, as is also true in India. In higher education, the attempt to displace English has resulted in a decline in standards that a developing country can ill afford. In post-apartheid South Africa, the ANC denounces English as a `colonial' and `disempowering' language; yet its leaders are fluent in it and hypocritically use it not only publicly but also socially. And although nine African languages enjoy constitutional recognition, many Black parents want their children to learn English because they believe it is in their long-term interest, a sentiment which they share with parents throughout the Third World.

Linguistically and lexicographically, Australia has reached a self-confident stage, though, if it is not smart in negotiations on the proposed US_Australian free-trade treaty, we may regretfully find it necessary to start using a Canadian term, cultural sovereignty. It is taken for granted now that Australians will have an interest in the particularities of their variety of English. Sue Butler's Dinkum Dictionary is not really a dictionary. That word connotes an attempt at completeness of coverage of the field. Rather, it is a collection of amiable essays on the origins of selected Australian words. It is intended for browsing rather than reference. There is no index of words, and who's to know that Murri, Nyoongah and all the other Aboriginal words for Aboriginals are listed under Koori or that emu-bobbing and -parade occur under bush-bash? Not all of the detail is accurate. The story is repeated that the word larrikin appeared on Melbourne streets in the 1860s; that may be true, but it ignores evidence that that word is recorded throughout New Zealand a few years earlier. The entry London to a brick fails to mention the key point that brick was slang for a ten-pound note (because of the brown colour). The Queensland governor Lord Lamington (1899_1905) may have something to do with the cakes called lamington, but the variant forms leamington, lem(m)ington (see again the Dictionary of New Zealand English, 1997) raise the possibility that the origin is a more complicated matter.

The self-confidence is also indicated by ongoing investigations into the dialectology of Australian English. Bill Ramson, the originator and editor of the Australian National Dictionary (1988), recognised that the reading for the dictionary (mostly done in Canberra and at the Mitchell Library) had neglected the regional press and instituted new studies to redress the possible imbalance. Glossaries of Tasmanian and Western Australian terms have resulted and are now joined by Voices of Queensland. It turns out that there are in fact few Queenslandisms, strictu sensu. At morning recess, Queensland school-kiddies eat their little lunch (rather than play-lunch) and at parties Queenslanders dip cheerios rather than cocktail-frankfurts into the tomato sauce. For safety reasons, coconut trees are denutted, a term that means something rather different down on the farm. However, a sense of the difference, the uniqueness, of Queensland does emerge from the typical words, most known and used elsewhere, discussed in the chapters devoted to the `good life' in the sun (no mention, though, of melanoma), the outback, the canefields and Queensland politics. Another world-view also emerges in the fascinating last chapter, a lexical account of Kayardild, an Aboriginal language spoken by forty or fifty people on the South Wellesley Islands in the south-east corner of the Gulf of Carpentaria. Major contact with them only occurred in the 1940s, and the language remains less affected by white influence than most. Unkind observers have been heard to regret the cultural isolation of the whole of Queensland. Things have changed a good deal in the last ten or fifteen years, and the difference recorded in Voices of Queensland has eroded considerably. No longer would boys boarding together in the country complain about having to share a small duchess with tight drawers (duchess, a dressing-table; not a Queenslandism, the word is used in New Zealand, too).