Australia is colloquially known as "the Land Down Under" (or just "Down Under"), which derives from the country's position in the Southern Hemisphere, at the antipodes of the United Kingdom.
There are also a number of terms for Australia, such as: Aussie, Oz, Lucky Country, and land of the long weekend. Names for regions include: dead heart, top end, the mallee, and the mulga.
The name Australia was popularized by the explorer Matthew Flinders, who said it was “more agreeable to the ear, and an assimilation to the names of the other great portions of the earth”. Several famous early cartographers also made use of the word Australia on maps.
After Dutch navigators charted the northern, western and southern coasts of Australia during the 17th Century this newly found continent became known as 'New Holland'. It was the English explorer Matthew Flinders who made the suggestion of the name we use today.
Before discussing their language, it's important to know what people from Australia and New Zealand call themselves and their countries. People from Australia call their homeland “Oz;” a phonetic abbreviation of the country's name, which also harkens to the magical land from L.
The word Australia when referred to informally with its first three letters becomes Aus. When Aus or Aussie, the short form for an Australian, is pronounced for fun with a hissing sound at the end, it sounds as though the word being pronounced has the spelling Oz..
There is no one Aboriginal word that all Aborigines use for Australia; however, today they call Australia, ""Australia"" because that is what it is called today. There are more than 250 aboriginal tribes in Australia. Most of them didn't have a word for ""Australia""; they just named places around them.
Hooroo = Goodbye
The Australian slang for goodbye is Hooroo and sometimes they even Cheerio like British people.
New Holland (Dutch: Nieuw-Holland) is a historical European name for mainland Australia.
There is no record of the name for Australia before the Europeans and white settlement. The native inhabitants of Australia, the Aboriginals, did not have a name for the entire continent.
But it's also used in almost every English-speaking country. In England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland, Australia, India, Canada (usually), and New Zealand, Z is pronounced as zed. It's derived from the Greek letter zeta.
Yeah nah yeah = yes. No wonder you're confused! A commonly-used word here is mate, which normally means friend.
So, we would say, instead of 'can't', we don't say the /t/ and instead we just say 'can't', and the tongue stops the air, 'can't'. So, it sounds like a very, very, very short N sound instead of a long N sound.
Australian English can be described as a new dialect that developed as a result of contact between people who spoke different, mutually intelligible, varieties of English. The very early form of Australian English would have been first spoken by the children of the colonists born into the early colony in Sydney.
'Aboriginal' (adjective, capitalised) is a term extensively used and widely accepted throughout Australia when referring to Aboriginal peoples and topics. Aboriginal peoples are the first peoples of mainland Australia and many of its islands such as Tasmania, Groote Eylandt, Hinchinbrook Island and Fraser Island.
Why not say 'Hello' in an Aboriginal Language? Wominjeka means Hello/Welcome in the Woiwurrung language of the Wurundjeri people of Kulin Nation – the traditional owners of Melbourne. Yumalundi means Hello in the Ngunnawal language. The Ngunnawal people are the traditional owners of the Canberra region.
Some of the most well known Aboriginal words for hello are: Kaya, which means hello in the Noongar language. Palya is a Pintupi language word used as a greeting much in the same way that two friends would say hello in English while Yaama is a Gamilaraay language word for hello used in Northern NSW.
Blackfella
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people often use the word 'Blackfella' amongst themselves, but one should be very careful using the term as a whitefella, as some people might take offence.
Colloquial names for Australia include "Oz" and "the Land Down Under" (usually shortened to just "Down Under"). Other epithets include "the Great Southern Land", "the Lucky Country", "the Sunburnt Country", and "the Wide Brown Land". The latter two both derive from Dorothea Mackellar's 1908 poem "My Country".
Australian English arose from a dialectal 'melting pot' created by the intermingling of early settlers who were from a variety of dialectal regions of Great Britain and Ireland, though its most significant influences were the dialects of Southeast England.
The Aussie accent started with kids
But their children born in Australia formed friendship groups and started to talk in ways that were more like each other and less like their parents. Over the years the children's accent was carried on by each generation and became the main accent of English across Australia.