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"Linguists say Australian youth talk like Americans" :lol:
The article
We're to blame the "prestige model" - the aping of elite fashions (like when Hadrian started a trend with his beard ?). I blame prevasive U.S. films and television programming.
Has anyone of our Aussie members noticed this trend among the "youth" ?
How about U.S. spellings in local media ?
~Theo
Jaime
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 ( ( ( .......'fraid it's all too true ! What with Gangsta Rap, T.V. , Music and Movies U.S. culture is all-pervasive....so our youth culture is replete with borrowed expressions, such as young girls saying"What-ev....er !", and boys saying things like "suck it up !!
....and yes, thanks mainly to 'spell-check' etc, U.S. spellings are creeping into common use....... ( (
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Paul McDonnell-Staff
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Same in this country, while we're supposed to learn Oxford English in school, it gets quickly diluted with the more recognizable expressions of US Enlish (oooh my gaaawwwwd!)
And Paul, you can't blame spell-check for that on Word processors. Every decent one comes with variations in English. It's user laziness in that case, when they can't be bothered to change the language setting to their native country's version of English.
Note: yankification of my own English started when I came in contact with the real thing...I used to be able to produce a quite nice affected English, but if I try it now, it comes out mangled as if I'm mocking Englismen. Quod non!
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Quote:....and yes, thanks mainly to 'spell-check' etc, U.S. spellings are creeping into common use....... ( (
I do not regret it. Orthography is there to facilitate reading, not to distract people from the text. If more people are accustomed to "color" than to "colour", a writer who wants to gets his message through, must adapt that spelling.
Jona Lendering
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Oh my god this is, like, so totally true!
I suppose it just comes from the USA exporting a lot of TV and film (sorry, "movies") to the rest of the world.
There was also an article in the UK a couple of years ago about how our youths were speaking like Australians because of the Oz soaps we have here.
Sometimes I like the mixing of slang. I prefer the American "nerd" and "geek" to our version of "boffin". Possibly because I was called "boff" at school though :lol: On the other hand I don't like it when someone in the UK says "season" instead of "series" for a TV show.
On Digital Spy forums someone was having a go at Americans for saying aloominum instead of our alumin ium and called them stupid. When apparently the inventor did actually call the stuff aluminum. There's lots of words that to Brits now sound American but actually originated in the UK.
Languages evolve though all the time so it's pointless to be annoyed by it. It's like the word "gay" which causes some debate. It meant "happy" then moved on to "homosexual" and now can be an insult for something which is a bit "rubbish" even by those who couldn't ever consider themselves homophobes. People might get their knickers in a twist now but in a couple of years it will be uncool to say "gay" and there will be a different word to replace it.
As for accents, like the article says it's not like the Australian accent would be wiped out just because we pronounce a few words differently. I'm guilty with the word "schedule". I'm still not sure if I should say it "shed-ule" or "sked-ule" :oops:
Slightly unrelated but I think the greater threat to English would be text message slang. I detest with a passion getting texts or online chats where they say "were u from" instead of "where" or "hru" instead of "how are you".
I had a chat room PM the other day that was "hy hru bbe were u frm wana cht gt msn".
I wanted to cry.
(ideally I'd prefer " hello there, how is one this fine day? Where do you hail from? Would you like to spend a few moments of your time chatting to me. If you have an internet messaging device it would be jolly lovely to add your details." but I can't see that ever happening  )
Kat x
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Quote:Oh my god
Quote:oooh my gaaawwwwd!
I get so many bad looks when I try to use this phrase around women: I think the real spelling and pronunciation is three sentences as exclamations, thus:
OH.
MY.
GOD.
It's even in the new movie Mamma Mia
Richard Campbell
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Quote:Quote:Oh my god
Quote:oooh my gaaawwwwd!
I get so many bad looks when I try to use this phrase around women: I think the real spelling and pronunciation is three sentences as exclamations, thus:
OH.
MY.
GOD.
It's even in the new movie Mamma Mia
It's because you should call us "Oh My Goddess" 
Quote:OH.
MY.
GOD.
I'm sure it took off more after a character in Friends used it.
Kat x
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In parts of the UK its Jamacan-isation the youth adopt .... just waiting for the day when coming into Heathrow the pilot will say;
Me wan fi tell yu I gon lan de plane,suh lash up wid de belts :o
Conal Moran
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Quote:In parts of the UK its Jamacan-isation the youth adopt .... just waiting for the day when coming into Heathrow the pilot will say;
Me wan fi tell yu I gon lan de plane,suh lash up wid de belts :o
:lol:
Where in Wessex do they talk like that, I'll have to go and visit :lol:
Kat x
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Quote:On Digital Spy forums someone was having a go at Americans for saying aloominum instead of our aluminium and called them stupid.
Hmmmm.....if accents determined whether or not an individual is intelligent, then job interviews or school tests can be summed up by the word "Hello", and that would be the end of it. Even in the U.S. we have a good variety of accents and dialects (if you will). To say that Australian youth are speaking like Americans is a bit confusing to me. Which Americans? Americans from the South, with their Southern dialect. Or New England, the Mid West, etc. I’m sure every country is the same.
To prove my point, the Marine Corps sailed my unit off to Australia from Okinawa, Japan (and Bali in between) back in 1998 to participate with the Australian Air Force in a joint training exercise on Townshend Island. Two Australian fighter-bombers flew over our heads and carpet bombed the hell out of some small rock of an Island off the coast of Townshend (And we thought we were doing some damage with our mortars).
Anyways, afterward we were allowed some down time in Gladstone and a book store owner I was talking to told me I had a Californian accent. I was kind of shocked because I figured that I didn’t have an accent at all (I come from a family of dairy farmers in the central valley, and being a country boy I don’t have the beach boy thing going on). Come to find out he had been to more states in the U.S. than I have, on vacation and what not, and he claimed to be able to recognize every accent from the U.S. It made me realize that all the while I was thinking that he was the one with the accent, to him I was the one with the accent. The point is that your accent only determines where you come from, the cultures and languages that are prevalent in your neck of the woods, and not a reflection on your intellect.
But, honestly, Im sorry that of all the American accents that Australian kids would choose to adopt, they would choose to adopt the Hollywood accent, yuk.
Anyhow, we all loved Australia. It was almost like being home, except for the funny accent :wink: ..........
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Quote:Which Americans? Americans from the South, with their Southern dialect. Or New England, the Mid West, etc.
Southern California. :wink:
It's a music thing. When I say I can't understand a single word utterred from the mouths of some youngsters here in South East London,.... But then I think back to my own youth and imagine older people sometimes couldn't understand what on earth I was talking about, either.
"Cool, Daddio!" Now I wonder what was made of that decades ago?
TARBICvS/Jim Bowers
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And yet, there may be hope...
Quote:American teenagers are ditching their own slang in favour of Brit-speak, thanks to the fictional diaries of an English schoolgirl. But first they need a translation...
It's no longer to hip to use words like, well, "hip" in the malls and schoolyards of the United States. Instead, the cool kids want to speak like a Brit.
The Georgia diaries: "Bridget Jones for teens"
The fictional diaries of Georgia Nicolson, aged 14, are a hit with teenagers across the Atlantic.
To aid those unable to work out what "snog" and "wally" might mean, the US editions come complete with a glossary of British terms, such as "bloke", "prat" and "Rolf Harris".
Click here for Georgia's glossary
The competition to sound British is so fierce that author Louise Rennison, of Brighton, gets thousands of letters and e-mails from her American fans, begging for more slang.
"What really gets me is that they ask for a 'British to English translation'," says Ms Rennison, a former stand-up comedian.
Cool Britannia
Others try out their mock-English accents on her at book signings, but tend to sound like an Aussie-Scottish hybrid.
Louise Rennison: Draws on teenage memories
"One girl said to me, 'We're practising being British, but my friend is better at it than me'."
The terms that crop up in Georgia's confessional diaries are a curious mix of modern British slang, and anachronistic terms that are more St Trinians than Top Shop.
Some are taken from common parlance, some from the 50-year-old author's days as a teenager, and others are pure invention.
Cheeky monkey!
Georgia may not speak like a bona fide British teenager, but Ms Rennison is proud to have turned the tables on the nation which unleashed "cool", "like" and "wassup" upon the world.
Boyzone: See below for Georgia's verdict
The latest instalment - titled Knocked Out By My Nunga-Nungas - seems destined to follow Angus, Thongs and Full-frontal Snogging and It's OK, I'm Wearing Really Big Knickers! into the best-seller lists.
Ms Rennison puts the American craze for British slang down to the fact that it's a bit rude, a little bit naughty - something of a novelty in these days of political correctness.
"Teenagers really love something that's theirs, something secret. I think that's why they've adopted Georgia's language," she says.
"When I was a teenager, we used to make up cults. We'd get deliberately obsessed with something like The Magic Roundabout, and speak as if we were, say, Brian the Snail, until it became the language of the school.
"I like to think that that's what's happened with my books."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/1443007.stm
This could see an interesting contrast with the 'in' US youth speaking pukkah English while the lower classes of the Anglosphere gonna be awraht.
Der Kessel ist voll Bärks!
Volker Bach
just my own two cent here but english accents vary on region. and i dont mean English english but people who are raised to speak english.. UK, Australia, US, etc.. and in the US alone there are soooooo many variations you can hardly keep up with them. you can tell which state a person is from (or isnt from) by their accent.
Even though i was born and raised in the south i have a lot of friends from all over the world that i talk to on the phone, or went to school with. plus my husband, though he was born in New Hampshire, he can mimic nearly accent he hears. the funny part is he isnt doing it on purpose. if he's around my family long enough he'll talk like a southerner.. if he's around his family he's back to being from New Hampshire, his friends in Holland even have an effect on his accent lol he can even do a fairly accurate Irish Accent.
The only one he's truly bad at is English... i've banned him from trying to imitate a British accent because .. well... :roll: just think Dick Van Dyke in Marry Poppins.. :oops:
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