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Australian English is the English language as used in the Commonwealth of Australia, population over 19 million, which is, with Canada, third in size and distinctness among the primary English-speaking countries. English has been used in Australia for about 200 years.
Australian English is markedly homogeneous, with three kinds of accent: (1) Cultivated Australian, similar to Received Pronunciation in the United Kingdom, and formerly highly regarded; (2) Broad Australian, often compared with British Cockney; and (3) General Australian, the majority variety, occupying the social middle ground. Australian English does not pronounce r in words such as art, door, and worker. The vowel in can't dance is closer to that in "kent dense" than in "cahnt dahnce" or "kaynt daynce," and the Broad version of I'm going there today sounds to some ears like "I'm going there to die."
Australian English and British English spelling are generally identical (with some ambivalence in the -or/our endings, most notably in U.S.-style Labor, the name of a political party). Grammar is comparable to general usage in both Britain and the United States, but Australian English has a large and distinctive home-grown vocabulary that includes: (1) Adoptions from Aboriginal languages, with a penchant for spelling with double letters (as in corroboree and kookaburra) and mainly relating to animals, plants, objects, and localities (as, for example, billabong, boomerang, didgeridoo, dingo, koala, Murrumbidgee, Woomera), a process similar to American English's adoption from Native American languages; (2) Extensions in meaning of everyday words, for example, to feel crook "to feel ill," to farewell somebody "to give somebody a farewell party," mob "a flock or group (of sheep, kangaroos, etc.)," station "a ranch," as in sheep station; (3) Extensions or shifts in the meaning of British dialect words, for example, cobber "a friend, mate," dinkum "reliable, genuine"; (4) Distinctive informal word endings, for example, -o in abbreviations such as arvo "afternoon" and journo "journalist," and -ie in names for workers such as truckie "truck-driver" and wharfie "stevedore." See New Zealand English.
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