Australian English: A Totes Amazeballs Lingo

By Mike Hytner on March 26, 2013 in Other

Something struck me as I travelled down the Hume Highway towards Canberra the other week and the apparently random combination of the words ‘smash’, ‘a’, ‘pav’ and ‘today’ screamed out at me from a giant roadside billboard: I love the way you lot talk.

I genuinely had no idea what the advert was trying to tell me and only after a brief consultation with my passenger did the penny drop: by encouraging us to ‘smash a pav today’, the poster was actually proposing that we buy and then unceremoniously devour a pavlova from a McDonald’s outlet before the day’s end.

Those were not the only strange words in the advert though – even the world-famous fast food chain’s name appeared in unfamiliar format. The unmistakable golden arches were still evident, yet rather than McDonald’s, this poster appeared to be advertising a restaurant called Macca’s.

It transpires that the global junk food behemoth is currently on some kind of rebranding drive Down Under, a move that goes a long way to show just how strong a force Australian slang has become. To foreigners it is virtually indecipherable, yet to Aussies it is now much more than just a way of speaking to mates.

The Queen Mother may be turning in her grave, but that hoarding (that’s British for billboard!) certainly brought a smile to my face (even, indeed especially, before I understood it properly). For me, the shortening of words by chopping off a syllable or two and then sticking an ‘o’, ‘y’ or an ‘ie’ on the end is what makes the English spoken here so unmistakably Australian. An accent can only do so much in that respect, but in a way the depth of the abbreviations, nicknames and monikers has allowed Australians to take ownership of their language.

The way these colloquialisms are so widely accepted is equally as endearing. Where else in the world has a mother tongue been so corrupted yet at the same time fully embraced across the country? In England, the language has of course been bastardised, not least in inner-city areas where the kids these days effectively speak a foreign tongue, but their words remain unrecognised and marginalised by the vast majority of the population. Certainly so by the marketing departments of companies such as McDonald’s. In Australia though, the parlance of the everyday person is celebrated and embraced – and understandably so.

Ever since I heard the slang Alf Stewart articulated during my adolescence (“you flamin’ galah” etc.), Australian English has always held something of an interest for me. The vocabulary seems to be more diverse now, and it has certainly moved with the times, but today’s equally baffling lexicon is no less fascinating – or entertaining.

So instead of the ‘rack offs’ and ‘drongos’ delivered into the UK consciousness via Neighbours and Home and Away, we now have the likes of (and this is just a small selection of my personal favourites) fishos, smokos, deros, docos, relos, Salvos, veggo, avo, ambo, Steve-o (not at all an abbreviation), amazeballs (ditto) and perhaps the best of the lot, the bottle-o, which if a bit exy might leave you totes devo.

It just leaves me to say, good on youse and keep up the good yacker. (I’m not entirely sure that works, but if you can make stuff up, why can’t I?)