• language

George Bernard Shaw once remarked that the UK and the USA were two countries divided by a common language. This helped emphasise what was already well underway in the eighteenth century when Johnson and Webster wrote their separate dictionaries with different spellings and some different meanings.

What is less obvious to us Poms is that Australians speak a different language—sometimes known as Strine, from the local pronunciation of “Australian”. As an outsider you assume that Strine is the same as English English (hereafter referred to as English with no parochialism intended) at your peril. Strine is rich with idiom, littered with abbreviation, includes both ancient English and neologism, and is riddled with potential misunderstanding for the unsuspecting Pom. Remember, too, that the television soap opera Neighbours is owned by a British company and is watched by the numerical equivalent of half the Australian population in …