Speaking our language: The story of Australian English was written by Bruce Moore, Australia's foremost lexicographer and Director of the Australian National Dictionary Centre (ANDC) at the Australian National University. It presents Australian English as the natural and national language of Australia, and provides an historical, linguistic, and cultural account of this distinctive variety of English, examining the past, present, and possible future of Australian English.

Australian English has generated great interest in recent decades with the creation of Australian English dictionaries, and the ANDC has collected some 14,000 uniquely Australian words. The vocabulary of Australian English was created by means of new coinages and borrowings from regional varieties of British English, with a small set of words borrowed from or influenced by indigenous languages. Moore considers meaning shift in these borrowings, describes other semantic and morphological phenomena, and supplies additional etymological information. This colorful variety of English encodes the values and traditions of its people and helps construct the Australian identity. The vocabulary reflects periods in Australian history and concomitant sociopolitical conditions in areas such as transportation, colonization, immigration, the gold rush, and wartime. Moore also discusses how Australian English evolved to represent the environment in the naming of flora, fauna, and landscape. The book provides numerous examples of this productive dialect, including inventive idioms, words, rhyming slang, and colloquialisms.

Moore investigates the origins of the Australian English accent, claiming that it was well-established by the 1830s. He favors the theory that the accent resulted from the “leveling” of various dialects, rather than the contentious belief that it is a form of Cockney transported “intact” to Australia. Moore describes the distinguishing phonological features of Australian English in modern usage, including the High Rise Terminal intonation, the characteristic diphthongs, the popular view of the accent as “flat” and “nasal”, and the elision of syllables as parodied by the notion of Australian pronunciation as “Strine”. He also addresses sociolinguistic aspects of the Australian English accent. “Broad”, “General”, and “Cultivated” forms exist as divergent social accents across Australian English. Negative perceptions of Australian English appeared in response to the Received Pronunciation of British English, and Moore suggests that Cultivated Australian developed to counter these attitudes. Conversely, he claims Broad Australian arose as a marker of identity and solidarity, attracting covert prestige. Moore explains that General Australian is the dominant form, and argues that it is replacing these minority social accents. In contrast to other varieties such as British English and American English, Australian English is uniquely homogeneous, with very few regional differences in grammar, pronunciation, and vocabulary. There is internal diversification, however, with the emergence of ethnolects and the indigenous Aboriginal English dialect. Moore explores both regional and social accents in the context of the development of a “Global English”.

This is a lively and fascinating book that is suitable for both linguists and the general reader intrigued by Australian English.