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Article published In: English World-Wide
Vol. 46:2 (2025) ► pp.154–185

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From quacker to quokka

A historical sociolinguistic study of phonological variation in the colony of Western Australia

ORCiD logo with link | The University of Western Australia
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Available under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.

Open Access publication of this article was funded through a Transformative Agreement with University of Western Australia.

Published online: 23 June 2025
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https://doi.org/10.1075/eww.24027.cle
Abstract
In charting the history of Australian English, little attention has hitherto been paid to Western Australia, an extremely isolated colony established in 1829, some 40 years after the First Fleet arrived on the eastern coast. Using a historical sociolinguistic third-wave perspective, this study looks at the linguistic behaviour apparent in diaries and a memoir by two sisters born in the colony in the mid-19th century, finding unconventional spellings which may signal phonological features. Different spellings for the Indigenous loan word referring to a unique local animal, codified in present-day English as quokka, also prompt further investigation of historic records, finding that the spelling and likely pronunciation of the animal’s name has changed over time. As the source language, Nyungar, has no present-day fluent speakers, the original pronunciation of the word is uncertain, but the timing of the apparent shift of its first-syllable vowel may suggest markedness levelling in an emerging dialect.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.A methodology for Western Australia
  • 3.A colony in extreme isolation
    • 3.1An envelope of isolation: Trudgill’s deterministic model
    • 3.2Schneider’s dynamic model
    • 3.3A local speech community in mid-19th century Western Australia
  • 4.The texts and authors
    • 4.1The diary and its author
    • 4.2The memoir and its author
    • 4.3Geography, mobility, transmission and diffusion
    • 4.4Research questions and method
  • 5.Analysis
    • 5.1Quaka/quacker to quokka: Variation and phonological signalling in an Indigenous loan word
    • 5.2A loan word across genres: 20th-century style-shifting
  • 6.Discussion
  • 7.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgments
  • Notes
  • Sources
  • References
References (86)
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