My article by Potato

English is spoken all over the world, so there are many different kinds of English. British English (BrE), American English (AmE) and Australian English (AusE). My article is about Australian English, I will talk about idioms, hypocoristics and the pronunciation. In the following article you will see that not every English is the same.

First, I’ll talk about Australian idioms. An idiom is an expression with a meaning that cannot be guessed from meanings of the individual words. An example for an idiom is “Mad as a cut snake”. If somebody is mad as a cut snake, he lost all sense of reason, is crazy, out of control.

Next, I will talk about the pronunciation of Australian English.

Words that are spelled with the syllables -ure,- er, -or, -ar, -our, -a, -re are pronounced /a/. (For example, water is pronounced at the end, in Australia with an -a in England with an -e and in America with -er.)

Australians pronounce the /t/ like a /r/ or “t-flap”. When pronouncing this sound, the tongue doesn’t touch the roof of the mouth for a long time, the tongue moves back to the back of the mouth after briefly touching it’s roof. For example: difficulty and better.

Another fact is, that people in Australia use different words for things like people are used to, for example, they don`t use the word sweater, they usually use the word ‘jumper’.

People in Australia also use hypocoristics and word formation procresses. This means that the people sometimes change words or add them together, so that they get ( create) a new word. For example, ‘smoke’ and ‘fog’ to “smog”. Or they leave the final part out, to get just a part of the word. For example, flu (from influenza).

Often you split a word (Australia-Aus) and add another suffix (Aus-Aussie).

All in all, people all over the world say, that is very difficult to understand the type of English, which is spoken in Australia. People describe it like a mumbling.