G'day Helen,

It will be interesting to see how the internet allows this to work ... or not. There was a very good analysis done before the internet - sampling crowds in Canberra ... during the Australian Bicentenary, 1988.

Being Canberra (our National Capitol was created as a "New City" in the early 20th century), it meant that everyone was on "neutral" ground - and the sampling was all from visitors, so a fairly even coverage for the whole of Australia was acheived. One result confirmed what I long suspected from my experience of the East Coast: There is a definite "Sydney Triangle", with its own subset of words, in comparison with the rest of Australia, which has a fairly standardised vocabulary. The triangle is, roughly, refined by the respective areas of influence of Newcastle, Wollongong and Bathurst.

(Of course, us Sydneysiders always reckoned it was "Sydney ... or the bush"!)

Regards,

Bob Bolton