Evidence of Australian cultural identity through the analysis of Australian and British corpora

1. Abstract This paper reports on findings of a keywords analysis comparing the ACE corpus of written Australian English (AusE) and the Flob corpus of written British English (BrE). The main aims of the study are to provide evidence of the cultural representativeness of ACE and to identify significant features of lexical frequency associated with written AusE which are distinct from written BrE. This paper shows how the physical environment has helped shape the Australian lexicon. It also demonstrates clear differences in the use of colour and personal reference terms. Although this study has discovered many lexical features which confirm that Australia’s identity is very separate from that of Britain’s, it is demonstrated that the British influence on Australian English and culture is still pervasive.