Another designation that is frequently heard is First Australians. In Australia, where the native peoples have long been labeled Aboriginal, the word Indigenous is becoming the preferred term. In some literature, particularly old anthropological and missionary texts, Native Americans are referred to as the Aboriginal peoples of America.
In North America, the American Indians some years ago expressed a preference to be called Native Americans, a more accurate label. I had to move to Australia to bother to look up the term and learn that Aboriginal applies to native (indigenous) peoples throughout the world. It's not! Don't use it!Īboriginal/Aborigine a common term for an Indigenous Australian. Visitors and newcomers to Australia often make the mistake of using this slang, thinking it is simple shorthand for aboriginal. Ībo This short term for aboriginal is a serious and hurtful racial slur. (By the by, if you're in the market for Aussie bar-crawl slang that predominantly focuses on the area demarcated in the north by the navel and in the south by the knee, click here for clever and witty X-rated phrases-strictly not for delicate sensibilities.) Another useful and entertaining Internet record of Aussie phenomena is The White Hat Guide to Australian Inventions, Discoveries & Innovation at. I highly recommend it for anyone who will be staying in Australia for any length of time. Recently I discovered a book that seems to have done a fine job of making an analysis of Australian English, including an exhaustive listing of slang words and phrases, Bruce Moore's Speaking Our Language: The Story of Australian English. The dictionary to which I refer below as the Oxford Australian is the Australian Pocket Oxford Dictionary, 5th ed., which, by the way, would require a very large pocket to contain it. My son, who has lived for extended periods of time in both Perth and Sydney, was the first to mention that Australian accents aren't as diverse as American accents, yet also the first to mention that there are what he calls "localisms": "In the west, beer is pronounced bee-ah, in the east beeh. So, in fact it is not just the location (east vs west) but the socio-economic class." To me 'bathers' is a word used by a Mum trying to be posh or sound upper class. A good example you used was 'bathers' vs cossies. So we in the east seem a tad less formal and use less typically english phrases. As you mentioned - a lot of this must be because of the larger amount of people directly derived from english stock - probably non-convict/free settler stock too. Aussie Lance Brooker writes, "I must say as someone from the 'east' there really are definite differences between Vic, NSW, QLD (eastern states) and South Australia/WA (non-eastern states). However, many Australians tell me they can hear accents from different parts of the country, and as noted in some of the definitions, there are apparently regional differences in slang. advised that the regional differences in accent and slang are minimal in Australia, as compared to the U.S. For instance, the transplanted British slang for bathing suit (or rather, bathing costume), cossie, is just as acceptably spelled cossie,cozzy and cozzie.Ī few Australians who have lived in the U.S. The same search turned up Ozian as a Hungarian surname.) Spellings of slang words that end in a y sound or contain the double s so frequently pronounced as z ( zed in Australian, not zee) have varying spellings. (Though I had thought the word Ozian to be my original contribution to Aussie slang, a recent Internet search revealed that the term Ozian is routinely used in reference to characters in The Wizard of Oz and, in at least one case, it was used as a double entendre for both Oz folk and Aussie folk. The Australian love of slang is perhaps unparalleled anywhere in the world, adding a rich vocabulary of original words to the world's Englishes. Most of these Oz-adopted words are British, the peoples who most influenced the formation of the unique culture that is today's Australia.
Many of these terms are not original to Australia, but rather simply unfamiliar to me.
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