Last Updated: 20/09/2023

Sometimes, no actually often I find myself wishing that this Icon was part of the Australian Scholastic Curriculum, but sadly it is not.

Even the latest V9 of the AC, only includes an ELLA and an ELLIC, but NO Australian Lingo on the horizon..

I know some of you probably think that this is just silly and should be not taken seriously, but I believe you would be wrong. I came from a country where we have, or perhaps I should say we had several different Dialects and when I was a child I had to learn because that was part of my culture… Today, a merely 30% of the population actually know or understand their own town dialect. Another tragic statistic of something that soon will be lost for ever..

I can see that one of the problem starts with the name… People call it slang, or lingo, but that doesn’t really help. But if you think of it as a dialect, or the Australian dialect, that makes us different form all other country where the English language it is spoken, then you  start to see, something different… It is now part of what we are, our culture.

 Ok, at the moment we probably don’t have a full size dialect, but we do however already have a good bunch of words and few famous frases (I decide to stop using Ph instead of the letter F, as it doesn’t really make sense), some of which are world wide famous… As a parent, I simply encourage you to teach your kids, our culture and our way of life, and most of all, to be proud of being Australian. We are a young country but we need to work a lot harder to retain our culture intact and above all to allow it to survive in the future…

Some of our words have made an impact world wide.. Things like “selfie” written for the first time in 2002 in Australia, is possibly the most used word today by the young generation.

There are fragments of this dialect of our, scattered all over internet, even if the Oxford Dictionary will let you look at most of them in one place, for a fee (bastards)… And here it is, how many of you know where this sentence does come from?

“Which one of you bastards called this bastard a bastard?” or “do the Harry” or the famous “Bushman’s handkerchief”…

I would like to collect as many of them as I can and perhaps even make a little free PDF downloadable version of it. Why? Well for start because I can and secondly because it gives me something positive to do…

Soon I will have an entire page dedicated to the subject with lists, forms, and downloadable PDF to take to parties and for the most brave, to school.. If you have any suggestions or better ideas of how to go about this little project, I’m all hear…

Stay tuned