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People Of Australia Share 30 Words And Names They Usually Pronounce Completely Different To Americans
Mark Webber has not competed in Formula 1 racing for almost ten years, but the memory of his inimitable Aussie accent is still alive among racers and fans. And he is not alone - literally any American or English who has been in close contact with a representative of the Green Continent for some time will sooner or later tell you a story in the style of "do you know how they pronounce this word?"
In fact, Australian English is a unique linguistic phenomenon, one of the most distinctive varieties of the most widely spoken language on our planet. Yes, things are different in Australia. And the words to which we are so accustomed sometimes sound quite unexpectedly different there.
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Carmel. There's another A there for a reason.
Melbourne.
Americans pronounce it as it's spelt, we pronounce mel-burn.
Actually I would say we pronounce it as "mel-bn" totally eliding the final vowels
The first British colony on the Australian continent, New South Wales, was founded in 1788, and after a little over thirty years, English scientists who came to Australia were forced to admit that a new version of the language had formed on the continent. And the more new settlers from different parts of Britain and Europe crossed the two oceans, the more different this option became.
*edit because apparently I need to say ~not all seppos~*
**F*****g "emoo"**. Also; Meer (mirror), squrl (squirrel), w**re movie (instead of horror), Erin when they mean Aaron, creg (craig), gram (Graham), riz-OE-toe (risotto). Nuculer... also I listen to a podcast where the guy says dragon weird, almost like draygon.
OH and when they say iron like eye-ron. And nitch instead of niche. And twot instead of twat.
How are they managing to f**k up "sentient"?
Edit to add CARRRR-mul, o-REG-a-no, and this f*****g video https://youtu.be/sa3Tl3t88Mc where they say wooder instead of water, or even their usual wahhhhderr.
American here - I've tried to say "squirrel" like British people and Australians do. It's not easy. There is a squirrel in my neighborhood, so I asked him. I really could not get him to register any sort of preference at all.
Aluminium, pecan, almond, fillet, herbs, Melbourne, Cairns
Of course there’s multiple varying accents in the US, and some of these only occur in a subset:
erb for herb
boo-ee for buoy
yuman for human
aLOOminum for aluminium
flar for flower
J. S. Back for J. S. Bach
American here - We actually spell it "aluminum." It's because of the American Chemical Society.
English writer Anthony Burgess (that very guy who wrote The Clockwork Orange) described mid-twentieth-century Australian English as "a kind of petrified cockney from the Dickensian era." But at the same time, the language was strongly influenced by the languages of Aboriginal Australians, and the influence of American culture in the second half of the century also did its job.
Today, according to linguists, about a third of Australians speak the so-called Broad Australian, nearly half of the population uses General Australian, and about ten percent usually maintain a conversation in Cultivated Australian. Do you want some auditory examples? For the first option just listen to, let's say, Bryan Brown or ex-Premier Minister Julia Gillard. For the second - it's enough to hear how Nicole Kidman, Russell Crowe or Hugh Jackman speak. And to get acquainted with Cultivated Australian, simply watch any film with the participation of Geoffrey Rush or listen to a recording of the famous opera singer Joan Sutherland.
Innernet
We do tend to elide over the internal 't' in some words. Sometimes, they're pronounced closer to a barely vocalized 'd' than a 't'.
Interestingly, the final legitimization of Australian English in the minds of the Aussies themselves appeared relatively recently - in 1981, when the lexicographer Susan Butler published the first edition of the Macquarie Dictionary, which has since gone through seven reprints, and today is generally considered by universities and the legal profession to be the authoritative source on Australian English.
"There are many Englishes in the world: there's English English, or British English, there's American English, South African English, Singaporean English, Philippine English, and so on. Among those Englishes there is Australian English, which didn't really have any proper account, any proper record, of what its characteristics were," Susan Butler said in an interview with Junkee a few years before her retirement in 2017. "In those circumstances, communities can find it a little bit difficult to have a sense of what their English is, and certainly to believe in it - to believe it's a legitimate form of English."
Kirsten being pronounced ‘Keerstin’. Ick.
The name is Scandinavian, and that's how they pronounce it. Go argue with them.
Toob instead of tube. My kids all pronounce YouToob instead of YouTube …
Be that as it may, today Australian English sometimes sounds completely unusual to the American ear, and having heard it somewhere on the streets of Melbourne, some modern Dorothy definitely has the right to say: "I've a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore." Well, the more interesting it will be to scroll to the very end of this list and maybe add some more fascinating findings about how this or that word we are used to sounds far south of the equator.
Niche... They say "nitch"
I'm American and even I think that's wrong 😅 everyone says it like that and I hate it
Here in the US on a certain quizzing show, the host pronounced Uluru as oo-LOO-roo. Not only that but she was *correcting* a contestant’s pronunciation.
But it’s oo-la-ROO, right?
My American niece visited me in France (I'm English) and proceeded to correct me on so many pronunciations. I just wanted to strangle her...
Aussy instead of Auzzy. Even after an Australian has just said the damn word.
And lol at the Americans trying to convince us that they don’t realllly pronounce words different.
Dude, half your vocabulary is words y'all made up. Or you randomly add an 'o' to the end of it, like 'doggo'.
For some reason they say Dachshund as “doxund”. That is in no way close to the German it comes from.
So you don't pronounce 'Kirsten' the way Scandinavians pronounce it, but insist on linguistic purity when it comes to 'dachshund'? Sorry, mate, but you're just as screwed up as the rest of us English-speakers. Because English isn't a language; it's a dozen languages in a trench coat.
Oregano and basil have different stresses to the point that could be something else
Yes, "o ree gan o" rather than "or e gaan o", and "bays il" rather than "baz il". Oh, and 'erb without the h. Not that it matters much in the long run, I guess.
Antarctica (they don't pronounce the first t)
Yes, we do, although a lot of people don't say 'Ant-arc-tic-a' but 'An-tar-tic-a' for some reason.
Enquiry. Australians say en-quiry. Americans say ink-wery.
Our spellings are 'inquiry' and inquire' for both formal and informal investigations.
Antarctica - “Anardica”
Temperature - “Tempichure”
Van Gogh - “Van Go”
Graham - “Gram”
Craig - “Creg”
Herb - “Erb”
Emu - “Emoo”
Koala - “Koala bear”
Aussies - “Ahssies”
Mirror - “Mir”
Squirrel - “Skwerl”
I tried saying all of these words out loud just now, but I'm no longer certain what my natural pronunciations are, or if I'm getting skewed by reading all of these supposedly "incorrect" pronunciations XD I live in Southern California and I *think* I naturally say all of these words just like the quoted pronunciations. I'm no longer certain if these are "correct" pronunciations or if I'm being indirectly made fun of by people who pronounce these words "correctly" XD
Caramel/car-mel and aluminium/alu-minum was the removal of a syllable really necessary?
The syllable was added...by the English: "The two spellings (aluminum vs. aluminium) can be attributed to the chemist who discovered the metal, Sir Humphry Davy. It was back in 1807 when the English chemist identified the 13th element on the periodic table which he first named aluminum as a nod to alumina which refers to the oxidation of aluminum and has been used since 1790 or so (even before the element was discovered and named). It was not until 1812 when Sir Humphry Davy was encouraged by his fellow chemists to propose a name change for the metallic element to “aluminium”, pronounced as [ al-yuh-min-ee-uhm ]."
Harry as Hairy
Many of the American pronunciations vary between generations and regions.
The name Megan.
Pronounced Meh-gan everywhere else.
Pronounced Mee-gan in Australia.
Can confirm that we do indeed say "Mee-gan". Likewise Tegan pronounced as "Tee-gan"
Solder (EN) != sodder (US)
Soft-Ts (EN) vs hard-Ts (US) - tunes == choons, not toons
The massive over-emphasis on R-sounds and elimination of many L-sounds.
The many, many excuses that pop up if you mention the difference, about "that's how it used to be pronounced/spelled/etc", that are usually folk etymologies or just false.
‘ Lever’ to sound like ‘leather’, and ‘missile’ to sound like the first syllable in ’mistletoe’.
Yes, but you don't pronounce 'level' as 'lee-vul', do you? So why would you pronounce 'lever' as 'lee-ver'?
How no one is mentioning cement in here is amazing. Americans pronounce it seament as in semen instead of “Ceh-ment”
Note: this post originally had 34 images. It’s been shortened to the top 30 images based on user votes.
This is an awful article. Not because it is usa bashing, but because people pronounce words differently all over the world.
Most of these were so dumb that they needed to change the title of the article (though it's original tile...sort of....is still in the web address). Half are pronounced exactly the same as everyone else in the world, the other half have regional or historical reasons (seriously, stop bringing up aluminum and just do a bit of reading on its etymology).
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As long as the listener can understand what the speaker means does it really matter how a word is pronounced? Language evolves continuously and the point is to communicate so as long as people are communicating who cares?!
I love how this post is people from outside america acting like stereotypical americans that they claim to hate.
They're mostly wrong, too. The scientist who discovered aluminum was English...and named it 'aluminum'. It was other scientists who convinced him to add the 'i'.
Load More Replies... This is an awful article. Not because it is usa bashing, but because people pronounce words differently all over the world.
Most of these were so dumb that they needed to change the title of the article (though it's original tile...sort of....is still in the web address). Half are pronounced exactly the same as everyone else in the world, the other half have regional or historical reasons (seriously, stop bringing up aluminum and just do a bit of reading on its etymology).
Load More Replies... As long as the listener can understand what the speaker means does it really matter how a word is pronounced? Language evolves continuously and the point is to communicate so as long as people are communicating who cares?!
I love how this post is people from outside america acting like stereotypical americans that they claim to hate.
They're mostly wrong, too. The scientist who discovered aluminum was English...and named it 'aluminum'. It was other scientists who convinced him to add the 'i'.
Load More Replies...