Lexical andmorphosyntatic variation in Australian English

Australian English has only recently entered the Differentiation phase of the Dynamic Model (Peters, 2014), and this phase often leads to more observable social and regional variation. This chapter examines contemporary regional and social variation of Australian lexical and morphosyntactic features. The first part of this chapter reviews variation in the Australian lexicon and what this variation tells us about the differing history, personalities and social geographies in each state. The chapter next introduces some of the earlier foundational work on morphosyntactic variation within Australian English, but also more recent, often corpus-based, approaches. These works on the whole point to a series of often age- and gender-based variables that provide insights on innovations in the Australian social linguascape. This chapter overall frames variation within Australian English as a growing area of interest and one of growing possibilities.