Australian English is a new gallimaufry of essays on our language, edited by Peter Collins and David Blair. Some of these essays are built from narrowly technical materials, but all are aimed at a general readership outside the Linguistics departments. They spread way out across vocabulary, syntax, rhythm, phonology, linguistic geography and dialectical history. Among many other incidental pleasures, I am glad to have discovered here the useful term schwa, which is the name of the latter vowel in toilets, bouncer, and oval. The schwa is not in my dictionaries, but I shall make good use of it from now on.

We all crave distinction, or at least the white cockade of difference. Most Australians want to find themselves a particular clearing in the English language imperium. We know that we are largely ruled by the overweening powers of the United States and Britain, but we want Australian English – that battling oxymoron – to be distinct. We cherish a hope that our usage can somehow have the distinctive tang of sunlight, eucalypt leaves and coconut oil.

It would give an even more acute regional pleasure if linguistic disparities could be found between the states. Such differences as can be spotted are commonly prized: for example regional words like ports (cases), spiders (drinks) and bathers (togs), or such localised pronunciations as are memorialised in the joke about an interstate visitor who asked a Sydney taxi driver to take him to Castlecrag. ‘Or to Melbourne?’ came the reply, quick as a flash. David Bradley's authoritative essay on ‘Regional Dialects’ has much to tell us about the phonological aspect of these distinctions.

Everything changes. We all get an occasional frisson from the discovery that a familiar word has been colourfully metamorphosed by our juniors. When did a pencil become a grey lead, one would like to know; and when did a wicketkeeper turn into a wickey? Grammar slides around, too. Statistics in Australian English also make it clear that the feminist pronoun they, used after a singular antecedent, is here to stay, along with that stranger usage, the nob's pronoun in the accusative, as in ‘between you and I’.

It was Karl Kraus who wrote that the closer one looks at a word, the greater the distance from which it looks back. Much the same may be said of pronunciations, usages, syntax. In seeking to describe these phenomena, we peer into strange depths of history, class and social change. We also encounter strong feelings about supposed norms.

One highly amusing feature of this book is to be found in its quotations from outraged conservatives in Vaucluse and Double Bay, good folk who believe that the Broad Australian accent is objectively ugly, or that changing usage represents a gross betrayal of civilised values. There is also one marvellous character who wrote to a Victorian newspaper complaining of an opera audience calling out ‘bravo’, instead of ‘brava’ or ‘bravi’. A nob, or merely a droob? At the other extreme we have Robert Eagleson’s censorious observation that ‘In terms of acceptability conducted over the past five years I have found teachers to lag behind the rest of the community time and again’. Now there is a quaint new view of education!

Australian English provides us with a succession of different mirrors in which to peer at faces of our language, our conversation. The earlier, sociolinguistic section of the book divides into questions of social variation, social attitudes and norms: a division which entails many kinds of overlap, it need hardly be added. Everybody in this age of Kylie Mole will be interested in the chapter on AQI – that’s to say, the high-rising tone. Cate Poynton’s account of ‘Terms of Address in Australian English’ is wide-ranging and inquisitive, although she could have set the abbreviation of Australian names alongside the English traditions which have yielded up Meg, Sal, Nan, Dick and Jem.

It is Jan Reeves’s concentrated study of community attitudes to language which points up divergent social attitudes best, and it certainly brings the monsters out of the silver birch and silver salver suburbs. Admittedly her study is based on material from the ABC Weekly between 1939 and 1959, but its display of types ranges all the way from Double Bay’s view that Broad Australian is ‘a language bred of carelessness out of ignorance’ to Tumut’s noble claim that ‘There is a golden note in Australian speech that is beyond compare’. Good on you Tumut! Stick with it, mate.

 The second half of Australian English treats of ‘Language in Time and Place’. Here we find, inter alia, David Bradley’s essay and G.R. Cochrane’s study of the origins of the Australian accent. The history her may be a little disappointing to us nativists, especially since it is convincingly argued that the Australian accent came overwhelmingly from London. We do not make noises like the glamorous Celts, I am sorry to say.

The book is cleanly, if rather dowdily, produced. It has an excellent bibliography. And it offers many pleasures. For a general reader of literary inclinations, the most elegant and intriguing essay of all is G.W. Turner’s ‘Some Problems in Australian Etymology’. If the rest of the chapters have a tendency to damp down our romantic dreams about our language, these ten pages set the imagination scurrying once again. Try Turner on shickered and jackeroo for starters.