A first trip ‘round the world, part 43

I had never spent any time in an English-speaking country prior to my coming to Australia and during the 8 years I learned the language at school, none of my teachers were native speakers either. 

After that, I spent all of my free time during a 16 month military service in the French Air Force, brushing up whatever knowledge I had in the tongue of Shakespeare with “Méthode Assimil”, a French self-taught method that got me a head-start when I began teaching skiing to English-speaking clients (mostly Americans) during my two first years as an instructor. 

Following that, I was lucky to benefit from at least 40 day “immersion learning” of the Australian language on the boat and well-prepared to handle the Australian way of speaking on the first day I taught at Mt. Buller. 

Sure, my ski vocabulary was woefully inadequate and I soon discover that my poles were called “stocks” and the Molony’s ski rental down the road from the ski school was named “ski hire”. Since that time, I’m now into my 45th year of American English and I still must pay very close attention in order to occasionally understand an Aussie speaking. 

But why in the world do they talk so “funny”? There are lots of theories about that. 

One is that, due to the proliferation of flies, Aussies tried to talk with their mouths as tightly closed as possible, thus explaining the slur and shortened words that we hear today. 

Another theory is that the hordes of drunken convicts slurred their words so much that it added an intoxicated tone to their speech pattern. 

The scientific version is that Australian English began to split from British and Irish English after the Colony of New South Wales got established in 1788. Australian English arose from a mixture of early settlers that came from a variety of regions in Great Britain and Ireland. By the 1820s, the new slang was quite distinct from the languages spoken in Britain and Ireland. 

There’s of course the Aboriginal influence that also impacted Australian English—mainly names like dingo, kangaroo, boomerang, wallaby, that have also become international. 

Other examples are cooee and hard yakka. Cooee is also a notional distance: “if he's within cooee, we'll spot him”. “Hard yakka” means hard work. Also of Aboriginal origin is the word “bung”, from the Sydney pidgin English, meaning "dead", with some extension to "broken" or "useless". 

Many towns or suburbs of Australia have also been influenced or named after Aboriginal words. The best-known example is the capital, Canberra, named after a local Ngunnawal language word meaning "meeting place" that is also behind Mt. Buller’s notorious “Kooroora”. 

Of course, typical Australian expressions include “outback”, meaning a remote, sparsely populated area, the “bush”, a native forest or a country area in general, and “g'day”, a typical form of greeting. The complete list of course is much more substantial and it would fill pages of that blog and use time we all don’t have… 

I guess that’s why we all love 'Straya, right?