All you need to know about Australian English by killerkäppchen_05

There are different kinds of English languages like Australian English(AusE), American English(AmE) and British English(BrE). Also they are different in pronunciation,writing and for sure vocabularies. Finally this article will tell you the most interesting and very important facts about Australian English.

First Australian English is a non-rhotic language. This means that even thougt there is an “r“ in the spelling of a word, it is not always pronounced. In many cases “r“ is comitted after a vowel. But not all languages are non-rhotic, American English for example is (most) rhotic.

Second the words with the syllables “-ure, -er, -or, -ar, -our, -a, -re“ are pronounced /a/. An example for this is the word “neighbor“ which looks in IPA transcriptions like this: /’neiba/.

Another point is  that in Australian english the /t/ is pronounced like a /r/ or “t-flap“. When you pronounce this sound, the tongue moves back to the back of the mouth after briefly touching its roof. This kind of pronunciation mostly depends on the dialect of a speaker. In England some people produce a so called “glottal stop“ /?/ in their throat instead of a /t/.

The t-flap can be used when a word ends with vowel, then a /t/ and the next word starts with a vowel.

A hypocoristic is the short or familiar form of a Name.

Another interesting fact is, that there are not many words in Australian English borrowed from Aboriginal languages. They are often used for animals,cities or for significant cultural items. For Europeans the kangoroo was an extraordinary animal, because they have never seen a kangaroo. Many other plants and animals could be named as a native this or that, for example the koala was called a ‘native bear’. But for a kangaroo ther is not a native anything, therefore the Aboriginals asked the people how they named it and copied it in the other languages.

So that is all what you need to know about Australian English for a travel to Australian.