About 15 years ago, whilst I was still living in England, Phillip Adams wrote a wonderful piece in (I think) The Australian about the death of the Australian language.
In his article he lamented the diminishing use of such colloquial phrases as, “fair suck of the sauce bottle/saveloy,” and “don’t come the raw prawn with me.”
I took his cri de coeur to heart. From then on I started saying “G’day” to people, both face to face and in print, and attempted to use one Aussie saying a day in order that our linguistic heritage alive.
Now, a disclaimer: I don’t do this because I’m a 5th generation Australian or anything (I was born just outside London, after all), but instead I do this because one of the things that endeared Australia to me when I moved here at the tender age of 10 was the fabulous new language to play with: ‘Austral-English.’
So for the last 15 years and into the foreseeable future, if you get an email from me the chances will be very good that if it has a greeting or salutation in it, it will be “G’day”, not the boring “Hello” that you can get from anyone anywhere in the world.
I don’t pepper my emails or pod/vidcasts with lashings of Australiana (that would turn them into parodies or else confuse the buggery out of anyone not from around these parts), but I do think it important enough to help keep alive the Australian language.
So, would you join me, please, in the ‘Keep Australiana Alive’ campaign. Membership is simple: use something distinctly Australian each day in one of your communications. It doesn’t have to be a media release to the whole world, but it can be something that helps keep alive the incredibly rich aural landscape that is dying around us.
If yours is an Australian company, or an overseas company dealing with/in Australia, wouldn’t it be bonzer to drop one word into a communication that helps keep alive such a rich linguistic heritage? Of course it would.
Tell me, what are some of your favourite aussie sayings?
