About Australian Diminutives

The distinctive accent and colorful vernacular make the Australian way of speaking one of the most charming dialects in the world. This may be especially true in America, where an Australian accent is the surest form of salesmanship (and possibly foreplay), in everything from tourism to magazine subscriptions (which I cancelled as soon as I got home and came to my senses.) Take, if you will this example I heard in a (terrible, but linguistically entertaining) movie today:

Ratbag Pommy: “I just love the dingo lingo! Hey cobber, say something in Australian.”

Cobber: “Fuck off ya drongo. I wouldn’t piss in yer ear if yer brain was on fire.”


Perhaps one of the most amusing, if not equally frustrating, habits of the Australian tongue is the tendency to shorten words that are otherwise cumbersome, containing too many annoying consonants and syllables that might exhaust ones lips and detract from more important oral activities, such as drinking beer. Thus, ‘breakfast’ becomes ‘brekkie’; ‘sunglasses’ are ‘sunnies’; ‘flip-flops’ are ‘flippies’ (although, being shorter and containing fewer syllables, ‘thongs’ is still widely favored, context usually providing clarification. ‘McDonald’s’ is ‘Maccas’ (pronounced ‘Mackers’) and ‘afternoon’ is, inexplicably, ‘arvo’. I’ll leave it to my readers to put all of those together in a sentence.

With the exception of ‘arvo’, (which I find painful to hear, much more so to pronounce) I have adopted many of these diminutives into my daily speech, not so much because I am charmed by them, as because, I too am inherently lazy and need to free up more time for drinking beer. However, I draw the line at one particular abridgement. In fact, I am so offended by it that I loathe to even write it. I refuse to wish you all a “Happy Chrissy.”


Merry Christmas.


(Post Script: A Google search of the word 'cobber' yielded a hit at a website called, of all things 'AustralianBeers.com'. The entry lamented the decline of Australia's colorful vernacular and proceeded to blame it on America. Blaming America for every Australian cultural defect is a common past-time, which I will undoubtedly address at some point in the future. But for now, let's just leave it at "No one is fucking forcing you! If you, as a people, collectively choose to adopt American culture, there must be something to it!" Living abroad has, of late, infused me with a new found sense of patriotism.)