The Meaning of Manners in Australian English

Abstract

Conventional wisdom says that Good manners will open doors that the best education cannot. While manners have been studied by sociologists, anthropologists, and historians, who have uncovered an array of social processes performed in seemingly trivial daily encounters, this study, with its ethnopragmatic approach to semantics through the natural semantic metalanguage, brings a new perspective. The uniting theme of these “rules” in the Australian context centres on personal autonomy and its concomitant norm of not telling people what to do. The importance of manners in Australian English is evident in its frequency of use and its prominence in Australian child-rearing and etiquette literature.