Talk:Australian English

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Talk:Variation in Australian English

Volume of speech

I'm aware this might be taken as an insult, but it's not meant that way. Is there any particular reason why australians talk at a louder volume than other English speakers, and is this a known phenomenon? I've lived with six Australians, had two Australian workmates and have an uncle, aunt, two cousins and three second cousins who are Australian. And all of them had much louder voices than British people. Other people I know have commented on this too.... 86.2.38.112 (talk) 20:14, 13 November 2008 (UTC)

I think we are less loud than people from the USA? maybe Brits are unusually quiet? Irtapil (talk) 16:19, 23 February 2020 (UTC)

This isn't meant to be an insult either, but I've noticed that Australians are always talking about either Foster's, Vegemite, didgeridoos, boomerangs, dingos, koalas, kangaroos, wallabies, Redback spiders ("They'll nip ya down unda while your on the dunny!"), crocodiles, or how "them Kiwis aa shipe luvas". I've met a few Australians; these are just a few things I've observed. 208.104.45.20 (talk) 22:30, 13 November 2008 (UTC)

Both of these comments are nothing more than stereotypes / generalizations. They have no basis in fact, and therefore have no place in Wikipedia. Logicman1966 (talk) 02:39, 14 November 2008 (UTC)

i'm pretty sure the Fosters bloke is joking?

well we do like to live up to our sterotypes however innacurate —Preceding unsigned comment added by 5349U11 (talk • contribs) 14:02, 24 April 2009 (UTC)

"Southern Hemisphere accents"

What other "Southern Hemisphere accents" is this talking about? "It shares most similarity with other Southern Hemisphere accents, in particular New Zealand English." And does Australian English actually have much in common with them? I have heard people claim South African and Zimbabwean English speakers sound like us, but i think this is just a lack of familiarity with those accents rather than any real resemblance. To me they sound indistinguishable from native speakers of Afrikaans, and i cannot see how there is any similarity? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Irtapil (talk • contribs) 15:34, 23 February 2020 (UTC)

Irtapil: Southern Hemisphere English accents are distinct in the following: Fiji, Tonga, PNG, New Zealand, Australia, Mauritius, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Namibia, Botswana, Lesotho, Swaziland, Zambia, Tanzania, Falklands. FWIW, there are very distinct differences within South Africans English, both in comparison to those with non-English mother tongues (compare and contrast Zulu to Afrikaans!) and those (of all backgrounds) schooled during the apartheid era (where Afrikaans was compulsory in some form) and those schooled in a later period. --Goldsztajn (talk) 20:53, 25 February 2020 (UTC)

Goldsztajn: what do you mean by distinct? distinct from each other or distinct from the North as a group? What do they have in common? Irtapil (talk) 05:43, 26 February 2020 (UTC)

Irtapil:What do I mean by distinct? Well, between South Africa and Tanzania, someone who has Swahili as a mother tongue and who speaks English as a second language will have a different accent to a person with Zulu .... not to mention the contrasting historical/colonial legacies/influences of Arabic, German, English and Cape Dutch/Afrikaans. In Aeteroa/New Zealand there is recognition that there are differences within English: Māori English. I'm not a linguist or ethnographer, I'm not using distinct in any particular technical sense other than a generalised usage - discernibly and commonly different. I'm not aware of Southern Hemisphere English being anything other than a grouping for geographic purposes. Although, in case you have not seen it before, this table is of interest: Regional_accents_of_English#Overview - which does indicate the greater influence of Irish English on North America in contrast to Australia/South Africa/New Zealand which had greater Scottish-English and Regional England English influences (I'd also add that Yiddish had far more profound effect on US English than anywhere else!). --Goldsztajn (talk) 11:08, 26 February 2020 (UTC)

Goldsztajn Ah! I would call Tanzania east Africa. I thought we were talking about just SA and Zimbabwe. I didn't think there were many people using English as their primary language between Zimbabwe and Nigeria? They would often speak English, but as a secondary / foreign language? That's different to the accent that comes with a dialect of English. Angela Merkel speaks perfect English, but i'd not count Germany as a meaningful comparison for dialects of English. Irtapil (talk) 15:57, 1 March 2020 (UTC)

the USA certainly sounds different, but Australia and NZ sound more like the UK than USA, so north/south seems like a strange divide. Irtapil (talk) 15:57, 1 March 2020 (UTC)

gaol/jail

I was rather confused by this section giving jail as the Australian spelling and contrasting it with supposedly British gaol. I thought it was the other way around, and after verifying that gaol was indeed rather dated in British English, I changed the entry to make gaol the typical Australian spelling. However, the Wiktionary entry (which, I know, is ineligible to be used as a source) claims gaol is dated everywhere in the Commonwealth. About Australia, it contains the rather vague statement that "Most Australian newspapers use jail rather than gaol". So, does the spelling gaol still retain some currency, apart from proper names of specific er... prisons? If so, the article should mention both alternatives for AU. If not, that means it is now jail in the entire English-speaking world and the entry should be removed from the table altogether. Steinbach (talk) 12:00, 8 May 2020 (UTC)

According to Macquarie Dictionary, "In general the spelling of this word has shifted in Australian English from gaol to jail. However, gaol remains fossilised in the names of jails, as Parramatta Gaol, and in some government usage." This seems to match the situation in British English. My sixth edition of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary says, "In Britain, gaol is used in some official contexts, but otherwise is restricted to literary use, jail being the usual form. In American English, jail is the usual spelling."

Given this, I would support removing the entry on "jail" altogether, as it seems this is the dominant spelling across all varieties of English. Wcp07 (talk) 01:36, 9 May 2020 (UTC)

This older person still uses "gaol". I won't insist on younger people using it. They've all had too much American media impacting their lives from birth. But to act as if the older spelling simply no longer exists would be wrong. As noted above, it still exists in the names of older gaols. HiLo48 (talk) 01:48, 9 May 2020 (UTC)

I agree with Wcp07 actually, gaol seems to be outdated in all national English varieties listed in the table, so it may be best to omit it altogether. Does anyone know whether the Australian Oxford Dictionary spells jail as jail or gaol? If it favours gaol, we may include both spellings in the table under Australian English and keep that row, otherwise I vote we scrap that row. HiLo48, I'm afraid English evolves throughout the ages with new words being formed and different spellings becoming dominant. In the 19th century, when those jails were named, gaol may have been the dominant spelling, but our language has evolved since then and jail is now the dominant spelling. Fuse809 (contribs · email · talk · uploads) 03:58, 9 May 2020 (UTC)

A bit of a straw man argument there. I'm pretty sure I acknowledged that language evolves, so there's no need to be afraid. I also at no point argued that "gaol" is the dominant spelling today. But is that what we're talking about here? Do we simply pretend that less common but perfectly valid variants exist? HiLo48 (talk) 04:14, 9 May 2020 (UTC)

My apologies, I may have misread your reply a little. The table shows dominant spellings mate favoured by the Macquarie Dictionary, e.g. encyclopaedia is still a spelling used in Australia, especially in older texts, and it's a perfectly valid spelling, but because it is less used we do not list it in the table. I'm sure in Canada it has been used too, but because it's not the dominant variety we omit it due to space constraints. Likewise, I've seen people spell yoghurt as yogurt in Australia, and while it's a perfectly acceptable spelling variant etymologically, because it's not the dominant one it's not listed in the table. Just like how we omit the spelling analogue from the table because while it has been used in Oz, and is perfectly valid, it is not favoured by the Macquarie Dictionary. Likewise, I've read product information sheets (sheets that list drug info from the manufacturer) and they often favour the foetus spelling instead of fetus, despite being Australian, but we omitted the foetus spelling because fetus is favoured in Australia. Fuse809 (contribs · email · talk · uploads) 05:06, 9 May 2020 (UTC)

That seems a very narrow way to describe a language. HiLo48 (talk) 05:13, 9 May 2020 (UTC)

What you've identified there mate is the limitation of using a table to summarize a language and its differences from other closely related languages. The reality is that even if we list all spelling variants used in each country, we still won't have a fair comparison, because doesn't the popularity of the spellings and the main context in which each variant predominantly appears also relevant? We won't be able to fit that info into the table, so the table will never be a truly fair comparison. My guess is if we list all spelling variants used in each country the Australian, Canadian and British columns will look almost identical (assuming we omit context and frequency info), and the only one that'll look even a little different will be the American column. Fuse809 (contribs · email · talk · uploads) 05:18, 9 May 2020 (UTC)

I agree that the table should only list the most common spellings. Given that a table of this kind can only provide a limited overview of the spelling differences in each variety of English, it would make sense to remove a word that appears to be the less used variant in all varieties. We can always note at the top of the table that variants to these spellings are still nevertheless accepted in each language. Wcp07 (talk) 07:31, 9 May 2020 (UTC)

...or not. A single word in a table entry could mean that it's the only spelling that's ever used, or the one that's mostly used, or maybe used 60% of the time. Is such a table really very useful at all? HiLo48 (talk) 07:36, 9 May 2020 (UTC)

It has its limitations, of course, but some people don't want a big, bulky section to get a basic idea of the spelling differences, what they want is a quick summary of the differences in spelling and a table can be helpful there. We're not picking spellings out at random to put them into the table, we're choosing the variants that each nation's leading dictionary favours. Fuse809 (contribs · email · talk · uploads) 07:57, 9 May 2020 (UTC)

Okay, the discussion has flourished quite a bit in my absence... I think we reached a consensus that the spelling gaol is unusual today even in Australia. The fact that Wikipedia users still use it is of course anecdotal evidence and therefore unusable. The fact that the spelling gaol is still used in the name of some prisons is also irrelevant: proper names don't have to conform to changing spelling conventions. There are loads of English pubs with the combination ye olde ... in their name, that doesn't mean ye and olde are still common variants of the and old. I think we can safely remove the entry from the table for reasons given above. If someone wants to add nuance to the question, s/he may consider amending the Wiktionary lemma. Steinbach (talk) 23:18, 9 May 2020 (UTC)

The table doesn't have the word "common" in its title. Nobody is arguing that "gaol" is the most common anyway. Just that it still exists. Which it does. The table is problematic because it ignores anything but the most common spelling. Your standard would ignore a word used by 49% of the population. That's just dumb. HiLo48 (talk) 23:26

Thanks for the compliment. No, it has been argued extensively that authoritative dictionaries favour jail rather than gaol. And no, my standard would not ignore a big minority. But if a particular spelling is no longer stereotypically Australian, it doesn't belong here. For your information, the spelling centre does in fact occur in the US. But that doesn't mean it should be included as a possible variant in tables like these, for it would give the wrong impression. Steinbach (talk) 23:58, 9 May 2020 (UTC)

The vowel chart seems wildly off the mark

The chart seems to resemble Estuary English phonetics more than actual Australian phonetics, which may or may not be due to it being outdated, or perhaps because of its describing particularly the cultivation variation of the Australian accent, instead of the general variation. However, it's pretty clear that almost all entries in the chart do not represent the phonology of general Australian accent accurately.

Let's analyse an archetypal example of the modern Australian accent in a sample of Australian astrophysicist Matt O'Dowd's presentation for PBS Spacetime: [1], and go through some entries in the chart one by one:

• At 0:15, we hear the "i" in "big" pronounced as i and clearly not ɪ, as in the chart
• At 0:44, we hear the "e" in "Penrose" pronounced as ɪ (with the letter "e" being previously pronounced as e in "end" at 0:39, seemingly due to it being at the start of a word) and clearly not ɛ, as in the chart
• At 1:49, we hear the "er" in "rubber" pronounced as ɑ and not ə, as in the chart (although the "ure" in "future" was previously pronounced as ə at 0:47, but this seems to be an exception rather than the rule)
• At 0:55, we hear the "aye" in "decayed" pronounced as ɐɪ and not æɪ, as in the chart
• At 0:17, we hear the "i" in "like" pronounced as ɒə (with the ə being very short) and not ɑɪ, as in the chart

And these are only some examples. Can anyone find better sources and correct the chart, please? Because, as we've already seen from the sample presented, the current chart is very misleading. YourAverageMax (talk) 13:40, 26 July 2020 (UTC)

• That's incorrect. He is is pronouncing it as [ɪ]
• That's incorrect. He is pronouncing it as [e], I think you are confusing [ɛ] for [e]
• [ɑ], [a] or [ɐ] are some realisations of /ə/ in open or bare syllables in General Australian English. This is mentioned in the article Australian English phonology. But /ə/ is still the phoneme, and [ɑ] is just a phonetic realisation in this environment. Perhaps the environment of this sound change does not include the /ə/ after /j/ as in "failure" for this individual speaker.
• He is clearly saying /æɪ/, although his [æ] is not exact, as per the fronting diphthong chart in the Australian English phonology article. "[ɐɪ]" is the diphthong in "mine" and not "main".
• This is wrong. To me he is pronouncing it exactly as /ɑɪ/. You can't even see his lips round as he says it.

Jimydog000 (talk) 14:19, 21 August 2022 (UTC)

I agree with you mostly. However, "big" at 0:15 is indeed quite close to [i] in my opinion. He does say [ɪ] in other places, and I think this slight variation [ɪ~i] is quite common in Australian English. "Penrose" is [e]. "Decayed" might be [aɪ] with a front [a], but it's much rather [æɪ] than [ɐɪ]. No rounding in "like", but the offglide is lowered to [e~ɛ]. 92.218.236.121 (talk) 10:05, 8 February 2024 (UTC)

Coming back to this: Here's a clear example of [i] for /ɪ/: "in American history" [in əmeɹəkən histəɹi] ca. 1:07 from the start. 84.63.31.91 (talk) 12:42, 24 July 2024 (UTC)

Different

The final section of the article, on keyboard layout, has got me wondering whether Aussies use the British “different from” or the American “different than”. Anyone? Mr Larrington (talk) 08:51, 24 June 2022 (UTC)

I don't think I've ever seen a survey on that. I say "different from", and I've definitely heard "different than", but you might find "different to" is more common. HiLo48 (talk) 09:30, 24 June 2022 (UTC)