Noaaauuuuuuwwh

One of the frequent topics of conversation before I left for Oz was how much my diction and/or accent might or might not change.  I would have to say that I am much more easily influenced by the language of those around me.  I find new words and phrases novel and try to incorporate them into my speech.  Or at least that’s how I used to be before I came here.  Suddenly I am the one with the accents and using the funny words [or so they tell me – I think they’re all weird], and so I now find myself trying much harder to not integrate all the local colloquialisms into my regular speech.  Well, that’s not entirely true – I suppose it’s more that I’m attempting to be much more selective on what I integrate.  My actual pronunciations, on the other hand, are a battle that I refuse to let go. 

So far, I’ve only faltered twice on pronunciations and phrases that I find are silly, and they’ve just happened out of my mouth before I could stop it.  The first was the pronunciation of “banana” – they make all their a’s sound like the sheep’s sound: baaa.  The second was the common greeting, “how ya goin’”.  I refuse to acknowledge this as an acceptable greeting.  I can’t even logic how you get that set of words to make sense.  But, to my horror, the other day, I was busy meeting a lot of locals, and after the 59^th new person, and hearing “How ya goin?” 42 times in rapid succession, I greeted the 60^th person with that silly phrase and caught myself aghast. 

But with those two instances, I’ve been doing pretty well to be selective.  “Bogan” is a their term for “redneck”, except as far as I can tell a bogan is a redneck with a sprinkling of douchebag.  I’ve been trying to learn all the slang, derogatory terms for redheads to harass Shane, but so far all I can remember is “ranga” and “bluey”.  “Ginger” is apparently quite mild, and “ranga” is the next step up.  “Bluey” just happens to be another mild term that seems to fit Aussie sense of humour, so to me it’s a whatever term.  Pronunciation-wise, “Melbourne” is pronounced “melbun” and as only one syllable.  And most glaring is the way they say “know” and all its homonyms.  I don’t even know how to attempt to type out how their “no”s sound … there might be a u or even an umlaut in there and it's at least three syllables long. 

There are probably a few others, but at the moment, I’m drawing a blank.  If I find any particular gems, I’ll have to write them down for this thing.

-EP