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:
“Now that Stevenson is dead I can think of but one English- speaking author who is really keeping his self-respect and sticking for perfection. Of course I refer to that mighty master of language and keen student of human actions and motives, Henry James.”
—Willa Cather (1873–1947)
“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)
“What distinguished man from animals was the human capacity for symbolic thought, the capacity which was inseparable from the development of language in which words were not mere signals, but signifiers of something other than themselves. Yet the first symbols were animals. What distinguished men from animals was born of their relationship with them.”
—John Berger (b. 1926)