Sydney is Australia’s most multicultural city (closely followed by Melbourne), where four out of six people in some suburbs speak a language other than English at home (overall some 30 per cent of the population of Sydney doesn’t speak English at home). Sydney and Melbourne are home to around 65 per cent of all non-English speaking migrants, who together speak a total of some 240 foreign languages.
Many migrants predominantly use their mother tongue on a day-to-day basis and have only a smattering of English. Australia’s failure to train migrants in English is handicapping them in respect of economic, political and social life, and ghettos are emerging where Australian-born children don’t speak fluent English. There’s a thriving ethnic radio and TV broadcasting network, the Special Broadcasting Service (SBS), which was established in 1978 and broadcasts in the main cities.
Australian English is similar to British English but has its own colourful vernacular, called ‘strine’ (from the way ‘Australian’ is pronounced with a heavy Australian accent), thrown in for good measure. Strine (also called Ozspeak) is Australia’s greatest creative product and is full of abbreviations, hyperbole, profanities, vulgar expressions and word-tweaking. Strine is the language of a rebellious subculture and has its origins in the Cockney (London) and Irish slang of the early convicts. The use of strine and slang words varies with the state or region. The Australian language also includes many words adopted from Aboriginal languages. Surprisingly, an estimated 1 million migrants cannot speak English, a huge number in a country of only around 20 million people, and some 3 million residents (around 15 per cent of the population) speak a language other than English at home.
Australians often cannot decide whether to use American or British spelling (e.g. program/programme, labor/labour, etc.) and consequently misspellings abound. In everyday use, many words have a completely different meaning in Australia than they do in other English-speaking countries, such as crook (ill), game (brave), globe (light bulb), knock (criticise), ringer (top performer), shout (round of drinks) and tube (can of beer).
Everything and anything is abbreviated in Australia, often by shortening any word with more than two syllables and adding the vowel e or o on the end of it as in derro (derelict), garbo (dustman), reffo (refugee) and rego (car registration), or adding a suffix such as i, ie or y. Common Ozspeak includes Aussie (Australian), barbie (barbecue), blowie (blowfly), brickie (bricklayer), chrissy (Christmas), cossie (swimming costume), footy (football), mozzie (mosquito), postie (postperson), tinny (can of beer) and truckie (truck driver).
