Evidence for rhoticity in early Australian English

Update: Since starting the process of writing this post, I've released a video about this on my linguistics channel.

Disclaimer

The aim of this page isn't to say, "hey, yous were WRONG, Australian English actually used to be RHOTIC before BORING NON-RHOTICITY GOT RID of the GOOD OL' MAK O' TALK!" I'm just presenting evidence that certain dialects of English spoken in Australia were rhotic, and that some uniquely Australian rhotic dialects may have existed in some places throughout some parts of history. This is kind of inevitable: after all, in the late 1800's, accents in the British Isles (whence the vast majority of Australian settlers came) were much more likely to be rhotic than they are today.

The British Invasion of Australia

The British invasion of Australia pretty much began in 1788 with the arrival of the First Fleet, with roughly 1,373 people, in Botany Bay. Of the 732 convicts who landed, their average age was apparently 27. Most of these people were British, but there were a handful of French, African, and American convicts.
The first Europeans to be born in Australia were born almost immediately after this, but the number of Australian-born Europeans only reached a considerable number around the turn of the 19th century. On the 13th of September 1822, a letter signed "Lydia Languish" appeared in the Sydney Gazette, "calling for more social events to be organised for [Australian-born Europeans]". This seems to confirm that these people were a minority at the time.
According to Britannica: "Not until 1825 did the European population pass 50,000; in 1851 it was about 450,000, and by 1861 it had reached 1,150,000."
The number of convicts being brought to Australia increased dramatically around 1816; free colonies were established around the Australian coast around the 1820's and 30's; gold rushes happened from 1851 all the way through to around 1914. All of these events brought huge numbers of (mostly English-speaking) immigrants into Australia's various towns and cities.
In his 2004 paper Investigating Early Australian English (summarised by him here), Clemens Fritz states that attempts to seperate convicts (and their descendants) from free settlers (and their descendants) almost never worked: freed convicts often rose to high social status, and the children of free and imprisoned Australian Europeans were free to mix. Thus, we can tell that in this early stage of Aussie history, whether a free person (or their ancestors) came to Australia by choice or force probably didn't have a significant impact on the way they spoke, as people of either group were mostly free to mix. Fritz also brings attention to colonial Australia's very lax class system in the same paper, and contrasts it with the far stricter one present in Britain.

Rhoticity in the British Isles from 1800-1900

The very earliest Europeans to set foot in Australia almost certainly would have been rhotic. At the turn of the 19th century, rhoticity was almost universal in the British Isles, with the sole exception of certain inhabitants of London. Non-rhoticity began to spread around England at the same time, and by 1889, Alexander Ellis' description of the dialects of England paints the entirety of the east of England south of Middlesbrough as being non-rhotic, with rhoticity being variable north of there until the Scottish border. The Survey of English Dialects, conducted throughout the 1950's and mostly interviewing men born in the late 1800's, shows that non-rhoticity had by then expanded significantly so that now only the south coast, West Country, west Midlands, and Lancashire were rhotic.
This means that the only areas that were consistenly rhotic throughout the 19th century were the south coast of England, the West Country, the west Midlands, Lancashire, Scotland, and Ireland. Any colonists who came to Australia from these regions would have spoken rhotically. Colonists from the east coast of England, including London, seemingly weren't rhotic during the second half of the century. All of the areas in-between would have gradually lost rhoticity throughout the second half of the century.
Although the majority of the British Isles was rhotic geographically, a disproportionate deal of people would still have been non-rhotic due to most people living in cities, where it was more common. Non-rhoticity was practically universal in young urban English people by 1900.

The formation of Australian English

It's plain to see from our lexicon that modern Australian English was born from a melding-together of a variety of English dialects. We use Irish and Scottish "yous", West Country "yarn", American "bush", and west midlands "larrikin". But in our phonology, our mixed heritage is also very clear: our diphthongs sound like Cockney, but we don't drop our H's like Cockney; we're non-rhotic like the English, but we have the Weak Vowel Merger like the Irish.
[explain how dialect formation/levelling works, the stages n shit]
Bruce Moore, in Speaking Our Language: The Story of Australian English, reckons that the first Australian dialect(s) of English - as in, a unique form of English spoken by Australian-born Europeans - would have come about somewhere around the year 1830, when the various dialects spoken in the newly invaded land would have had some time to level out a fair bit.

Rhotic invaders?

Specific information about the English spoken by Australia's invaders is difficult to come by. In 1994, Lloyd Robson did a study on a sample of Australian convict settlers which probably equated to about 5% of the total convicts imported. This study gives us some slightly useful information about where the convicts where tried, which has a decent chance of telling us where they were from (but the correlation is certainly not strict). The data shows that 22.7% of men were tried in Ireland, 21.4% in the north of England, 19% in the south, 17.8% in London, 7.3% in East Anglia, 5.8% in the southwest, and 4.6% in Scotland. The equivalent stats for women show 34.6% Ireland, 20.6% in London, 17.5% in the north, 10.8% in the south, 8.7% in Scotland, 4.3% in the southwest, 2.4% in East Anglia, and 1% in Wales. Given the statistic from Nicholas and Shergold (1988) of only 11% of Aussie convicts being women, we can get a total breakdown (rounded to the nearest percentage) that:
  • 24% of convicts were tried in Ireland
  • 21% were tried in the north of England
  • 18% were tried in the south of England
  • 18% were tried in London
  • 7% were tried in East Anglia
  • 6% were tried in the southwest of England
  • 5% were tried in Scotland
  • And 1% were tried in an unknown location
  • Because I rounded everything to the nearest percent, the 0.11% of convicts who were tried in Wales slipped through the cracks. Poor sods.
    • Thus, if I grossly simplify the state of rhoticity in the British Isles during the 19th century, and also assume that every convict was tried in the region where they grew up, and also assume that Robson's sample is representative of the wider population of Australian convicts, I ESTIMATE that between 35% and 54.5% of Australian convicts would have spoken with rhotic accents (with the former number only counting Ireland, Scotland, and the southwest, and the latter number also counting 50% of the "south" and "north" regions of England).
    Robin Haines (1994) presents us with a handy-dandy little breakdown of the places of origin for assisted migrants brought to Australia from the UK between 1846 and 1850 ("assisted migrants" being people who were sent to Australia with the assistance of government programs). Interestingly, in contrast to the convicts, who mainly came from urban centres, most of the assisted migrants sent over from the UK came from rural areas. This makes sense: the government didn't want to send over too many city people, because the government knew that city people are useless. I might sound like I'm taking a dig at city people, because I am, but this is genuinely the reason for the overrepresentation of assisted migrants from rural areas.
    The data isn't great for our purposes because it lumps geographically distant areas together on the basis of how rural and urban they are, and the source whence Haines got this data is seemingly locked away in some obscure archive. Still, the data tells us that, of the 29,722 assisted migrants brought to Australia in those years:
  • 40.7% came from Wiltshire, Dorset, Devon, Cornwall, and Somerset
  • 15.8% came from Middlesex, Lancashire, Warwickshire, and Staffordshire
  • 11.4% came from Essex, Kent, Surrey, Hampshire, and Sussex
  • 11.2% came from Northamptonshire, Bedfordshire, Buckinghamshire, Hertfordshire, Oxfordshire, and Berkshire
  • 8.9% came from Huntingdonshire, Cambridgeshire, Suffolk, Norfolk, Lincolnshire, and Rutland
  • 8.3% came from Yorkshire, Nottinghamshire, Gloucestershire, Leicestershire, Northumberland, Durham, and Cheshire
  • 2.8% came from Cumberland, Derbyshire, Herefordshire, Shropshire, Westmorland, Worcestershire, Anglesey, Carmarthen, Carnarvonshire, Denbigh, Flint, Merioneth, Montgomery, Pembrokeshire, Channel Island, and the Isle of Man
  • 0.9% came from Glamorgan and Monmouthshire
    • Again, if I make sweeping generalisations about rhoticity, and base rhoticity's geography on Ellis (1889), and stupidly assume that all of these percentages are comprised from equal parts of the counties that make up their whole, and assume that Haines' sample is representative, I CAN TENATIVELY CONCLUDE that a whopping 68% of assisted migrants to Australia were probably rhotic speakers! That's crazy!
    HOWEVER, it's plain to see that in the 20th century Australian English was considered universally non-rhotic, and any non-rhotic dialects which may have existed were probably so obscure that they went unrecorded. The only recorded example of a rhotic Australian accent was the Aboriginal English from the coast around Adelaide, which I doubt is spoken with rhoticity nowadays as it was already receding in the dialect at the time. I'll talk more about that dialect in a bit.
    IN CONCLUSION, a decent proportion of Australia's settlers throughout the 19th century probably spoke with rhoticity, but during the 20th century all but a tiny bit of rhoticity seems to have totally vanished from Australian speech. I've got no clue why rhoticity got the boot, but I suspect it's summat to do with rhoticity being socially marked, and overall being a minority feature of speech (even if it was barely a minority). In the evolution of Australian English, the only minority features of colonial speech we see triumph and become parts of the language are ones that are not marked, such as the Weak Vowel Merger. Marked minority features, like h-dropping, always seem to get eradicated by dialect levelling no matter how widespread they are.

    Evidence from loanwords into Indigenous languages

    [what i said on that page + other research]

    The Aboriginal English of the Adelaide area

    [that one paper]

    Other evidence for rhoticity

    [read them papers]

    Conclusion

    [conclude]