English?

“Well at least we don’t have to learn another language.” That’s what I thought. After a couple of months in Australia, I’ve come to see it’s not so simple. We are definitely at an advantage to those church planters who have to learn a new language from scratch. We certainly don’t have to do that. But what people (perhaps especially Americans) often don’t realize is that the English spoken in other parts of the world isn’t just the same language with a different accent - it’s usually an altogether different dialect. If you go from Tennessee to California, you’ll hear a different accent. If you go from Tennessee to Australia, you’ll hear a different dialect. And different dialects can sometimes be very…well, different.

Consider the following sentence:

“I’m sorry I’m late, I had a prang on the way here.”

Now what do you think that means?

What is a prang?
A. A quick bite to eat.
B. A pressing errand.
C. A car accident.

If you don’t know the answer, welcome to my daily life. Since we speak the same language I understand that the person is apologizing for not arriving on time, but I may not necessarily understand why. (By the way, if you answered c then you got it right).

There are several categories of differences in dialect:

Pronunciation/accent
This is the least troublesome category, but it definitely can be tricky at times. This may be obvious to everyone, but there is much more difference between an Australian accent and an American accent than there is between any regional accents of the U.S.A. As different as an Alabama accent and a New York accent can be (to use two extremes), they are still both clearly identifiable as American accents. I’m sure this will change with time, but I frequently have to ask people to repeat themselves because their accent makes certain words unintelligible to me. For example, a few days ago when I was interviewing to be a volunteer with an Australian conservation organization, the girl interviewing me said (or so I thought) that they sometimes work in the “junes.” I said, “What’s a june?” She said, “It’s a large mound of sand.” She had actually said “dunes” but Australians sometimes pronounce d’s like j’s. There are probably hundreds of little differences in pronunciation of words, which to the untrained ear (i.e. mine) can be confusing.

Spelling
Australians use British spelling. I was already acquainted with some of these spelling differences, but there are more than I realized. And sometimes they are spelled differently enough to confuse me. For example, would you know what this word was? GAOL. If you’re stumped, so was I. It’s jail. Most of the time the spelling differences don’t make a difference in the pronunciation (e.g. jail/gaol sound the same); but sometimes they do. For example, aluminum is spelled aluminium; the extra “i” adds an extra syllable so that the word is pronounced al-oo-min-ee-um.

Slang
There is so much I don’t even know where to start. There are several different publishers that have entire dictionaries of Australian slang (you can get American slang dictionaries as well – who knew?). I’ll eventually figure it all out. No worries mate, she’s apples. (translation – it will be ok, it is a relatively easy task).

Abbreviations
Closely related to slang is abbreviations. Australians love to abbreviate things. As in every other word. From my American point of view it borders on the insane. Everything, and I mean everything, can by abbreviated by dropping the last syllable (or two) and adding an O or a Y to the end. Not only this, once a word is abbreviated by enough people it becomes, more or less, the official word. So that when I bought my car they told me I needed to go the RTA (DMV) and get my “rego” (registration), and when a well known musician is coming to town, the headline on my paper reads “Muso coming to Wollongong,” and the sign on the Hungry Jack’s (Burger King) down the road from my house says, “Breaky starts at 6.”

Speaking of breaky, how many meals are there in a day? Three you say. No, there are five. Instead of three big meals, you have five small meals. Between breakfast and lunch there is morning tea, and between lunch and supper there is afternoon tea. Not that you have to actually have the beverage known as tea at tea. That’s just what it is called. A ham sandwich and a coke are perfectly acceptable at tea. Did I mention that supper is also known as tea? No I’m not kidding. So the meals of the day are: breaky, morning tea, lunch, afternoon tea, and tea. Got all that straight? Good, cause I’m usually confused about it.

Word order and selection
How you phrase something is an essential part of language that we don’t usually even think about. Often you could phrase something several different ways and all of them could be grammatically correct, but only one “sounds right.” Here, someone is not “in the hospital” they are “in hospital.” Here, you don’t rent a car, you hire a car. Or to use another example, the most common greeting here is, “How you going?” (Not “G’day”, contrary to the popular image), while I totally understand what is being said here (sort of a cross between “How’s it going?” and “How are you doing?” - only shortened of course), it still sounds weird to me.

Same words, different meaning
Perhaps the most confusing aspects of a different dialect are words that are exactly the same in pronunciation, but have totally different meanings. For example, if you asked for a peanut butter and jelly sandwich here, you would get some strange looks; because, “jelly” here is the equivalent to “jello” or “gelatin” in the States. What we call jelly, Australians call jam (and what we call jam, they call “conserve”). So the proper thing to ask for would be a peanut butter and jam sandwich. Not that they wouldn’t still give you a strange look. A peanut butter and jam sandwich? Weird.

Different words
Many items are just altogether different. For example a stroller here is called a pram, a pacifier is a dummy, and diapers are known as nappies (since our teammates have a six month old baby, I have learned many baby words). For another example, when we were touring our house, I had this conversation with the real estate agent,
“If you rent this house you are responsible for lawn care.”
“No problem, I’ll just buy a mower and weed eater.”
“What’s a weed eater?”
“Uh…you know…it cuts weeds.”
Blank stare.
“It’s a mechanical device with a spinning cord on the end that cuts the edge of the lawn.”
“Oh, you mean a whipper snipper.”
“I guess so.”
“Yes, you do this with it.” She made a weed eater like back and forth motion.
“Yes, that’s it. I’ll get a whipper snipper.”
“Well actually, most people call it a whipy snipy.”

And that my friends is my life in Australia. There are probably hundreds of differences in each one of these categories. Which means there are thousands of ways for Australians to confuse the heck out of me! Well I have to go now, it’s time for tea.