Faces and Visions of the Australian Identity in the Aussie National Press

Abstract

The current paper is concerned with linguocultural (ethnolinguistic) analysis of australianisms as culture specific words which are either not found in British English (the mother tongue) or are different from their British counterparts to some extent. The main research question was to identify the key lexemes of this type and establish correlation between them and Australian values (the national identity) as well as ethnostereotypes in modern Australian society. The novelty of the approach to studying these lexical units is in looking at them in terms of their functioning in speech and pragmatics based on the most sensitive to social change and dynamic type of discourse – the media (The material was drawn for the national papers “The Daily Telegraph, Australia” and “The Australian” over the past decade). By means of the random selection method, definitional and contextual analyses six key concepts have been identified (fair go, fair dinkum, larrikin, battler, bludger, (hard) yakka – the last word being aboriginal) and their place in the national identity structure defined. Also, we found some differences in how the same australianisms were presented and ranked in either paper manifesting certain values (for example, battler) or anti-values (for example, bludger) depending on the editorial board’s opinion and/or the content. For instance, “The Daily Telegraph” clearly highlighted the idea of justice (e.g. fair go, fair dinkum), while “The Autralian” put more focus on praising the stubbornness of Australians in the struggle against various obstacles (e.g. battler). References to the boisterous (larrikin) nature of Australians were somewhat more frequent “The Daily Telegraph”, although this concept was quite important for both newspapers. One of the most interesting results we got was a shift in connotations of several australianisms. Thus, it was shown that some words (for example, larrikin), originally having a negative meaning, with time may become positively connoted, characterising a certain previously disapproved type of person / behavior as normal. The study can be continued to include more words of this type, especially aboriginal ones which are already used in media and call for ethnolinguistic (linguocultural) interpretation by researchers.

Keywords: Australian English, australianisms, national identity, intercultural communication, сultural linguistics, cultural value, cultural stereotype, newspaper discourse