Language
The English have contributed greatly to Australian life. Today, English is the most commonly spoken language in Australia.
English was inherited from English colonisation, and it is spoken by the vast majority of the population. It serves as the official language: the language in which government business is carried out. According to the 1991 census, 94% of Australia's. population speak only English. Adding those who speak English "well" or "very well" brings this figure to 96%. Australian English is similar to British English in terms of spelling, grammar, vocabulary, pronunciation and some slang usage. The differences are not usually a barrier to effective communication between an Australian English and a British English speaker, but there are certainly enough differences to cause occasional misunderstandings, usually surrounding slang or region dialect differences.
Read more about this topic: English Australian
Famous quotes containing the word language:
“It would seem as if the very language of our parlors would lose all its nerve and degenerate into palaver wholly, our lives pass at such remoteness from its symbols, and its metaphors and tropes are necessarily so far fetched.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Denotation by means of sounds and markings is a remarkable abstraction. Three letters designate God for me; several lines a million things. How easy becomes the manipulation of the universe here, how evident the concentration of the intellectual world! Language is the dynamics of the spiritual realm. One word of command moves armies; the word liberty entire nations.”
—Novalis [Friedrich Von Hardenberg] (1772–1801)
“Any language is necessarily a finite system applied with different degrees of creativity to an infinite variety of situations, and most of the words and phrases we use are “prefabricated” in the sense that we don’t coin new ones every time we speak.”
—David Lodge (b. 1935)