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The percentage of people who speak only the English language at home, 2021. Australian English (AusE, AusEng, AuE, AuEng, en-AU) is the set of varieties of the English language based off the British dialect native to Australia.
English is the majority language of Australia today. Although English has no official legal status, it is the de facto official and national language. [2] [3] Australian English is a major variety of the language with a distinctive accent and lexicon, [4] and differs slightly from other varieties of English in grammar and spelling. [5]
They are part of a continuum, reflecting variations in accent. They can, but do not always, reflect the social class, education and urban or rural background of the speaker. [3] Broad Australian English is recognisable and familiar to English speakers around the world. It is prevalent nationwide but is especially common in rural areas.
The United Kingdom, the United States, Australia, and New Zealand, where the overwhelming majority of native English speakers reside, do not have English as an official language de jure, but English is considered their de facto official language because it dominates in these countries. [citation needed]
Speakers have been noted to tend to change between different forms of AAE depending on whom they are speaking to, e.g. striving to speak more like Australian English when speaking to a non-Indigenous English-speaking person. [5] This is sometimes referred to as diglossia or codeswitching and is common among Aboriginal people living in major cities.
English is the de facto national language of Australia, while Australia has no de jure official language, [19] English is the first language of the majority of the population, and has been entrenched as the de facto national language since European settlement, being the only language spoken in the home for 72% of Australians. [20]
Historically, the Australian English speaking manuals endorsed the lengthening of /ɔ/ before unvoiced fricatives however this has since been reversed. Australian English lacks some innovations in Cockney since the settling of Australia, such as the use of a glottal stop in many places where a /t/ would be found, th-fronting, and h-dropping.
English in the Commonwealth is diverse, and many regions have developed their own local varieties of the language. In Cyprus, it does not have official status but is widely used as a lingua franca. [4] English is spoken as a first or second language in most of the Commonwealth.