The Australian Strine

Having spent my eight-month-stay between Sydney and Brisbane, respectively State capitals of New South Wales and Queensland, sharing Australians' life, and having also travelled a bit to other cities and States of the East Coast, I feel I must share my affection for this vast, exciting country and help you feel the very heartbeat of its rich and diverse existence. In this report, I am going to analyse and share what I discovered in Oz (Australia) about a country I fell in love with and the culture of its inhabitants. Thanks to this and to the research I made, I am now able to partly explore this fascinating and amazing culture. There were many ways of analysing the Aussie (= australian) culture. So why did I choose to explore the australian slang or strine? Firstly, because what better means to get to know a person and his culture than to discover and learn his language? In psycholinguistics, there are two beliefs; the first one shows that its human experience which shapes a language, whereas the second one tends to think that a language shapes the human mind. Accordingly to these two beliefs, I will first analyse the influences which have shaped the strine, and then in a second part what are the consequences of the Aussie slang on its speakers in their everyday lives. You could be wondering what makes australian English (AuE) such an extremely rich and interesting language. Throughout its history it has been influenced and built by four main sources.