Best School News

How is Australian English Different? ”Australian vs English”

As you all know, we’ve Elevators from everywhere the planet with an outsized percentage from Australia and therefore the US. And while our head office is predicated in Melbourne, we even have a team based within the Philippines and one among our writers based within the US. Australian vs English.

 

This is where it gets a touch complicated- if you hadn’t noticed, we LOVE producing content. However, our team within the Philippines learnt American English at college , our copyrighter from the US uses American English and therefore the remainder of us use Australian English.

Recommended:

I often get a number of our audience contacting me to means spelling and grammatical errors which technically aren’t really errors, so I assumed I might put together a touch guide to spot a number of the differences.

 

Australian vs English

 

 

Spelling

Australia shares the same spelling system with the British whereas the United States has a slightly different spelling system. Here are some examples:

-or VS -our

USA UK/ AUS
color colour
behavior behaviour
humor humour

 

-ize VS -ise and -lyze VS -lise

USA UK/ AUS
realize realise
prioritize prioritise
analyze analyse
organize organise

-ter VS -tre

USA UK/ AUS
theater theatre
meter metre
center centre

-ll VS -l

This one is a little tricky as there some exceptions such as install and compel, which are spelt the same in British and American English. But some examples of differences are:

USA UK/ AUS
fulfill fulfil
enroll enrol
installment instalment

-led + -ling VS -lled + -lling

Ok just to make this more confusing… for the following words, American English uses one “l” and British English uses two “l”’s.

USA UK/ AUS
traveled travelled
traveling travelling
labeled labelled
labeling labelling
modeled modelled
modeling modelling

Vocabulary

Oh and a really important one to notice is that in Australia we wear thongs on our feet and once we say that we aren’t talking about skimpy underwear – we are talking about rubber shoes or “flip-flops”!

Here are some other examples of differences in vocabulary:

USA UK/ AUS
apartment flat
college university
vacation holiday
sweater jumper
drugstore chemist/ pharmacy
cookie biscuit

Aussie Slang

Another thing you may have noticed is that Australians LOVE slang! We pretty much abbreviate everything. Sometimes you may even think that Australians are speaking another language! Here are just a few examples:

Sanga = Sandwich
Breaky = Breakfast
Sunnies = Sunglasses
Arvo = Afternoon

If you want the full Aussie slang guide, check out this hilarious YouTube clip:

Grammar

There are only a few small differences between American, Australian and British English in terms of grammar. Some examples are:

USA UK/ AU
I learned I learnt
I spelled I spelt
I had forgotten I forgot
Monday through Friday Monday to Friday

Thanks for the English Lesson but Why Are You Telling Me This?

The main point I want to make is that we have decided that moving forward all of our content will be written in Australian English because we are an Australian company. (Also, I don’t want you to think that we are terrible spellers!)

I hope this clears this up for you all and that you learnt a lot from this post. (See what I did there?)

Related Articles