Australian English should be seen as a major player among Late Modern Englishes, but there is a shortage of linguistic data for studying its evolution in the 19th and early 20th centuries. This survey invites advice from linguists about the most useful parameters for developing a representative corpus of historical Australian English based on ego-documents (letters, diaries, memoirs) written by people who were born in Australia or had arrived there in early childhood (<10 years of age).
This survey is based on findings of a pilot study of letters written to Government Botanist Ferdinand Mueller at the Royal Botanic Gardens in Melbourne between 1860 and 1898. That study identified 132 letters written by 87 Australian-born correspondents, with an average word count of 180. Other collections have been identified in Western Australia and Queensland which may yield 5,000 or more letters, and public and private collections in Tasmania and South Australia and New South Wales are also being investigated.
Given this range of materials to be drawn upon, this survey asks 8 questions about the scope of the corpus: what period of time it should encompass (based on writer/speaker year of birth), how many writer/speakers it should seek to include, and what would be an acceptable minimum word count. It should take a maximum of 10 minutes to complete.
Further comments or questions are welcome to madeleine.clews@uwa.edu.au