Studying Reggie Vee. (Letters).

SIR: I have just seen the article on regional differences within Australian English by Alex Buzo (January-February 2002), which makes some surprising and inaccurate claims about work on this topic in Australian universities.

While indeed all scholars correctly note that Australian English has less internal diversity than the regional varieties of the British Isles or even the USA have, there is a growing body of work which documents the less extreme differences which exist and are continuing to develop within Australian English.

There has been substantial work on regional vocabulary differences, most notably research by Pauline Bryant published in the Australian Journal of Linguistics and elsewhere. At the Australian National Dictionary Centre at AN-U, several volumes of state vocabulary have been compiled by Maureen Brooks and Joan Ritchie: Words from the West (1994) and Tassie Terms (1995). Many of these differences are also in the Macquarie Dictionary, especially the second and third editions.

To give just one well-known example from our own work, the processed luncheon meat known before the First World War as German sausage has since then been called strasburg or stras(s) ...