Seeing that today is Australia Day I thought I’d put in this article about the use of converting adjectives to nouns in our Australian version of English.

A Problem With Australian English
© Garth Dutton 2009

I have been living in Australia for quite a long time, but Australian English I find to be ‘beyond me’. I have no hope of getting a complete mental picture of the language, because in it a range of adjectives have become nouns.

The only other time I know of this happening is in the field of vicious political and ethic propaganda.

I speak Portuguese English, and in it nationalities can only ever be adjectives. For example, she is Italian, he is Brazilian etc. But in Australian English the equivalent terms are nouns, she is an Italian and he is a Brazilian.

And there the problem lies… In a singular noun you can only ever have one mental picture, and there is no such thing as a single mental picture of someone Italian or Brazilian. Yet Australian people appear to have one.

For a single picture of someone Italian, who would they choose? Someone with black hair and olive skin from Sicily, or someone with blonde hair and blue eyes from Trieste? And who do they see as ‘a Brazilian’? Pele, who is of black Angolan descent, or Ayrton Da Silva Senna, who was of mixed Portuguese and American Indian Descent?

Try as I may, I can find no answer, but I still can’t believe Australians see all nationalities as stereotypes.

I can think of some historical examples where adjectives have become nouns. In the first half of ‘Mein Kampf’, Hitler calls Jewish people ‘Jewish’, which is an adjective. Then he changed his mind and used the term ‘a Jew’ instead. As he now had a noun with only a single mental picture to work with, he created the most vicious ethnic stereotype in the history of propaganda.

The result of the change from adjective to noun was six million dead.

The First World War would have been over at the Christmas Truce in 1914 if the soldiers in all the armies had had their way. Generals and politicians wanted the war to go on and chose propaganda as their weapon to make sure it was fought to its conclusion. So they used the term ‘ a Hun’ to describe the average German soldier in saturation propaganda.

The war went on till 1918 and only ended when the constant barrage of hate propaganda caused German Army morale to collapse.

In the late 1940’s in America, Senator Joseph McCarthy took the adjective ‘red’ and turned it into a noun ‘a Red’. He had one mental picture to work with, so he created a vicious political stereotype of a Communist.

It turned into a ‘witch-hunt’ and many thousands of innocent people were persecuted and imprisoned. But there is one used by Australians of nationalities as nouns that has become dangerous.

Zimbabwe is a multi ethnic nation like Malaysia. There are two quite different black ethnic groups who live there, Shona and Matabele, and a white ethnic group who have no choice but to call themselves ’Zimbabwean’, because Robert Mugabe took away the only other name they had for themselves when he changed the country’s  name from Rhodesia.

The country fought Britain over independence for 14 years, under the rule of white leader Ian Smith, and his black successor Bishop Muzorewa and Australian visitors still insist on calling white people there ’British settlers’. Sadly they have no choice…

They have the term ’a Zimbabwean’ in their vocab and so can have only a single picture, and that’s of someone black. And what do black people on the rest of the continent think of white Zimbabweans?

Ever since Ian Smith declared unilateral independence in 11 November 1965, successive generations of them have gone to work for some years in other African countries, doing essential skilled work for local wages.

Britain has an appalling image in Africa due to the rapacious practices and exploitation  there by British big business. There couldn’t be a more insulting term than to call white Zimbabweans, “British settlers”.

I believe this tragedy for Australian English came about, because of the ‘oath of allegiance’ all primary school children had to take in the 1950’s. They had to salute the flag, then say aloud “I am an Australian.”

At my school, not one immigrant child would say it, because to all of them “Australian’ was an adjective, not a noun. But for the Aussie kids, they went on to call other nationalities by nouns as well.

We don’t want to lose Australian English, because, as a vehicle for rhyming poetry it is in a class all of its own. The only course of action I see available is a major education campaign in newspapers and in schools. Let’s hope the political will is there to do it.