People Of Australia Share 30 Words And Names They Usually Pronounce Completely Different To Americans

The first British colony on the Australian continent, New South Wales, was founded in 1788, and after a little over thirty years, English scientists who came to Australia were forced to admit that a new version of the language had formed on the continent. And the more new settlers from different parts of Britain and Europe crossed the two oceans, the more different this option became.

English writer Anthony Burgess (that very guy who wrote The Clockwork Orange) described mid-twentieth-century Australian English as "a kind of petrified cockney from the Dickensian era." But at the same time, the language was strongly influenced by the languages ​​of Aboriginal Australians, and the influence of American culture in the second half of the century also did its job.

Today, according to linguists, about a third of Australians speak the so-called Broad Australian, nearly half of the population uses General Australian, and about ten percent usually maintain a conversation in Cultivated Australian. Do you want some auditory examples? For the first option just listen to, let's say, Bryan Brown or ex-Premier Minister Julia Gillard. For the second - it's enough to hear how Nicole Kidman, Russell Crowe or Hugh Jackman speak. And to get acquainted with Cultivated Australian, simply watch any film with the participation of Geoffrey Rush or listen to a recording of the famous opera singer Joan Sutherland.

Interestingly, the final legitimization of Australian English in the minds of the Aussies themselves appeared relatively recently - in 1981, when the lexicographer Susan Butler published the first edition of the Macquarie Dictionary, which has since gone through seven reprints, and today is generally considered by universities and the legal profession to be the authoritative source on Australian English.

"There are many Englishes in the world: there's English English, or British English, there's American English, South African English, Singaporean English, Philippine English, and so on. Among those Englishes there is Australian English, which didn't really have any proper account, any proper record, of what its characteristics were," Susan Butler said in an interview with Junkee a few years before her retirement in 2017. "In those circumstances, communities can find it a little bit difficult to have a sense of what their English is, and certainly to believe in it - to believe it's a legitimate form of English."

Be that as it may, today Australian English sometimes sounds completely unusual to the American ear, and having heard it somewhere on the streets of Melbourne, some modern Dorothy definitely has the right to say: "I've a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore." Well, the more interesting it will be to scroll to the very end of this list and maybe add some more fascinating findings about how this or that word we are used to sounds far south of the equator.