The Oxford Guide to English Usage

ligible, the most colloquial spoken varieties of each are in some ways very different, and each can, in some contexts, be almost incomprehensible to a speaker of the other.
C.2 2. Canada
Canadian English is subject to the conflicting influences of British and American English. On the whole British English has a literary influence, while American has a spoken one. The Canadian accent is in most respects identical with General American. But where British English has four vowels in (i) bat, (ii) dance, father, (iii) hot, long, (iv) law, and General American three, Canadian has only two: bat and dance with a front a, and father, hot, long, and law with a back ah-sound. Peculiar to the Canadian accent is a distinction between two varieties of the I-sound and two of the ow-sound: light does not have the same vowel as lied, nor lout as loud. Canadians pronounce some words in the American way, e. g. dance, half, clerk, tomato, but others in the British way, e. g. lever, ration, process, lieutenant, and the name of the letter Z. Some American spellings have caught on, e. g. honor, jail, plow, program, tire, but many, such as -er in words like center, single I in traveled, jeweler, and the short ax, catalog, check, have not. In vocabulary there is much US.
influence: Canadians use billboard, gas, truck, wrench rather than hoarding, petrol, lorry, spanner; but on the other hand, they agree with the British in using blinds, braces, porridge, tap, rather than shades, suspenders, oatmeal, faucet. The Canadian vocabulary, like the American, reflects the contact between English and various American Indian peoples, e. g. pekan (a kind of weasel), sagamite (broth or porridge), saskatoon (a kind of bush, or its berry). It also reflects close contact with the large French-speaking community of Canada and with Eskimo peoples, e. g. aboiteau (dike), inconnu (a kind of fish), to mush (travel by dog-sled); chimo (an Eskimo greeting), kuletuk (a garment resembling a parka). And as there have been different degrees of settlement by the various non— English-speaking European nationalities in Canada than in the United States, so the range of European loan-words in Canadian English is markedly different, many American colloquialisms being unknown. On the other hand, there are several regional dialects that differ markedly from the standard language, notably that of Newfoundland.
C.3 3. Australia and New Zealand
There are no important differences in written form between the English of Great Britain and that of Australia, New Zealand, or indeed South Africa. The literary language of the four communities is virtually identical. Grammatically, too, the English of all four is uniform, except that each has developed its own colloquial idioms. Thus it is in the everyday spoken language that the main differences lie. The Australian accent is marked by a number of divergences from the British. (i) The vowels of fleece, face, price, goose, goat, and mouth all begin with rather open, slack sounds not unlike those used in Cockney speech. (ii) The vowels of dress, strut, start, dance, nurse have a much closer, tighter, more fronted sound than in RP. (iii) In unstressed syllables, typically -es or -ed (boxes, studded), where RP would have a sound like i in pin, Australian English has a sound like e in open or a in comma. (iv) In unstressed syllables, typically -y, or -ie + consonant (study, studied), where RP has the sound of i in pin, Australian English has a close -ee sound, as in tree. The result of (iii) and (iv) is that in Australia boxes and boxers sound the same, but studded and studied, which are the same in RP, sound different. (v) -t- between vowels, and l, are often sounded rather as they are in American English. A number of individual words are differently pronounced, e. g. aquatic and auction with an o sound as in hot in the stressed syllable; Melbourne with a totally obscured second syllable, but Queensland with a fully pronounced one (the reverse of the RP). Australian vocabulary reflects, of course, the very different nature of the landscape, climate, natural history, and way of life. Familiar English words like brook, dale, field, and forest are unusual, whereas bush, creek, paddock, and scrub are normal. There are of course a large number of terms (often compounded from English elements) for the plants and animals peculiar to the country, e. g. blue gum, stringybark (plants), flathead, popeye mullet (fish). The borrowings from Aboriginal languages hardly need extensive illustration; many are familiar in Britain, e. g. billabong, boomerang, budgerigar, didgeridoo, wallaby. Many of them have taken on transferred meanings and have lost their Aboriginal associations, e. g. gibber (boulder, stone), mulga (an inhospitable region), warrigal (wild, untamed person or animal). But above all it is in the colloquial language that Australian English differs from British. Not only are there terms relating to Australian life and society, e. g. jackaroo, rouse-about, walkabout, but ordinary terms, e. g. to chiack (tease), crook (bad, irritable, ill), dinkum, furphy (rumour), to smoodge (fawn, caress); formations and compounds like those ending in -o (e. g. arvo (afternoon), Commo (communist), smoko (teabreak)); to overland, ratbag (eccentric, troublemaker), ropeable (angry); and expressions like come the raw prawn, she'll be right, have a shingle short. While it is true that many Australianisms are known in Britain, and form the basis of various kinds of humorous entertainment, and while British English has borrowed some Australian vocabulary (e. g. the verb to barrack or the noun walkabout), there is yet a wide gap between the popular spoken forms of the two kinds of English.
The gap is less wide in the case of New Zealand English, where British influence has on the whole remained stronger. To a British ear, the New Zealand accent is hardly distinguishable from the Australian. Its main peculiarities are: (i) i as in kit is a very slack sound almost like a in cadet; (ii) a as in trap and e as in dress are almost like British e in pep and i in this; (iii) the vowels of square and near are very tense and close, and may even be sounded alike; (iv) the vowels of smooth and nurse are sounded forward in the mouth, and rather close. The chief differences between New Zealand and Australian English are lexical. The words of aboriginal origin are mostly unknown in New Zealand, while the New Zealand words drawn from Maori are unknown in Australia. Many of the latter, naturally, refer to natural history and landscape specific to the country, e. g. bid-a-bid (kind of plant), cockabully, tarakihi (kinds of fish), pohutukawa (kind of tree). There is a large everyday vocabulary, much of it, but by no means all, colloquial or slang, used neither in Britain nor in Australia, e. g. booay (remote rural district), greenstone (stone used for ornaments), return to the mat (resume Maori way of life), shake (earthquake), tar-sealed (surfaced with tar macadam), Taranaki gate (gate made of wire strands attached to upright battens). While a fair amount of colloquial vocabulary is shared by Australia and New Zealand (e. g. sheila, Pommy, paddock (field), shout (to treat to drinks)), there are important nuances. In both to bach is to live as a bachelor, but in New Zealand only is there a noun bach, a small beach or holiday house. Similar organizations are the RSA (Returned Servicemen's Association) in New Zealand, but the RSL (Returned Servicemen's League) in Australia: the initials of the one would be meaningless to a member of the other. Mopoke or morepork is the name for a kind of owl in New Zealand, but for either a nightjar, or a different kind of owl, in Australia.
C.4 4. South Africa
English is one of the two official languages of the Republic of South Africa, the other being Afrikaans (derived from Dutch, but now an entirely independent language). Afrikaans has had a fairly strong influence on the English of the Republic: the South African accent is distinctly “clipped”; r is often rolled, and the consonants p, t, and k have a sharper articulation, usually lacking the aspiration (a faint h sound) found in other varieties of English. I is sometimes very lax (like a in along), e. g. in bit, lip, at other times very tense (like ee), e. g. in kiss, big; the vowels of dress, trap, square, nurse are very tense and close, while that of part is very far back almost like port. As in the other forms of English of the Southern Hemisphere, the different landscape, flora and fauna, and way of life are reflected in the South African vocabulary, e. g. dorp (village), go-away bird, kopje, nartjie (tangerine), rand, rhenosterbos (a kind of plant), roman, snoek (both fish), springbok, stoep (veranda), veld. There are many loan-words from Afrikaans and African languages, e. g. (besides most of those above) braai (barbecue), donga (eroded watercourse), erf (building plot), gogga (insect), impala (kind of antelope), indaba (meeting for discussion), lekker (nice), rondavel (hut).
There are also many general colloquial words and phrases, e. g. the farm (the country), homeboy (African from one's own area), location (Black township), robot (traffic light), tackies (plimsolls). Some of these reflect the influence of Afrikaans idiom, e. g. to come there (arrive), just now (in a little while), land (a field), to wait on (wait for). Only a few words have entered the main stream of English, but they are important ones, including apartheid, commandeer, commando, laager, trek, and the slang scoff (to eat; food).
The spoken language of each of the main English-speaking communities, as well as of the smaller communities scattered around the world, manifests enormous differences in pronunciation, vocabulary, and idiom. The relative uniformity of the written, and especially the literary, language, stands in tension with this. The outcome is a world language of unparalleled richness and variety.