Strine

Quality 0.50 · 1 view · Updated 2 months ago

Australian accent

title: "Strine" type: doc version: 1 created: 2026-02-28 author: "Wikipedia contributors" status: active scope: public tags: ["australian-english", "australian-humour", "1960s-neologisms"] description: "Australian accent" topic_path: "geography/australia" source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strine" license: "CC BY-SA 4.0" wikipedia_page_id: 0 wikipedia_revision_id: 0

::summary Australian accent ::

Strine, also spelled Stryne (), is Australian slang for a broad Australian English accent. Someone who speaks Strine is called an Ocker. In contemporary Australian spoken English, the term Strine is being replaced by Strayan, a word gaining traction in more recent years (although Strine is still used among some populations). In written English, Strine remains more frequently used.

The term is a syncope, derived from a shortened phonetic rendition of the pronunciation of the word "Australian" in an exaggerated Broad Australian accent, drawing upon the tendency of this accent to run syllables together in a form of liaison.

The term was coined in 1964 when the accent was the subject of humorous columns published in the Sydney Morning Herald from the mid-1960s. Alastair Ardoch Morrison, under the Strine pseudonym of Afferbeck Lauder (a metaplasm for "Alphabetical Order"), wrote a song "With Air Chew" ("Without You") in 1965 followed by a series of books—Let Stalk Strine (1965), Nose Tone Unturned (1967), Fraffly Well Spoken (1968), and Fraffly Suite (1969). An example from one of the books: "Eye-level arch play devoisters ..." ("I'll have a large plate of oysters"). Contemporary examples include "rise up lights" ("razor blades").

In 2009, Text Publishing, Melbourne, re-published all four books in an omnibus edition.

The late environmentalist and TV presenter Steve Irwin was once referred to as the person who "talked Strine like no other contemporary personality".

References

Citations

Sources

  • Lauder, Afferbeck (A. A. Morrison) Let Stalk Strine, Sydney, 1965, page 9
  • Steber, David. Strine and Amusing Language from the Land Down Under, Steber & Associates, 1990. .

References

  1. "Google Books Ngram Viewer".
  2. "Google Ngram Viewer".
  3. Chris Roberts, ''Heavy Words Lightly Thrown: The Reason Behind Rhyme'', Thorndike Press, 2006 ({{ISBN. 0-7862-8517-6)
  4. ''The Oxford Companion to the English Language'', Oxford University Press (1992), p. 990 ({{ISBN. 0-19-214183-X)
  5. (October 2009). "Strine". Text Publishing Company.
  6. [http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2006/09/04/1157222070806.html "Freakish end to a wild life"], ''The Age''

::callout[type=info title="Wikipedia Source"] This article was imported from Wikipedia and is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Content has been adapted to SurfDoc format. Original contributors can be found on the article history page. ::

australian-englishaustralian-humour1960s-neologisms