Just in: Australians can’t pronounce “Australia!”

What are you looking at "American"?

The 2020 Olympic Games in Tokyo, Japan are right around the corner and how excited are you for the jingoistic bacchanal? The correct answer is “very” and you are not alone. Professional surfer Kanoa Igarashi is so excited that he changed his nationality to Japanese from American and don’t you think it is funny that Americans call themselves “American?” I mean, there are 23 different countries in North, Central and South America with each having an equal claim to the “America” moniker.

I mean, not “equal” the America we call America has much more money and a much larger military than the other 22 combined but still. Funny. But not as funny as Australians not being able to pronounce the word “Australia.”

In a gorgeously written piece, author Tiger Webb walks though the historical and modern troubles Australians have with Australia. And let us read.

Towards the tail end of 1933, Londoners realised something strange: BBC announcers seemed to take multiple approaches to pronouncing the word Australia.

In one, the first syllable rhymed with the title of Patrick White’s then-unpublished Voss. In the other, the first syllable resembled the vowel sound in ore.

This state of chaos terrified the British public so much that newspapers lobbied the BBC to go with (their orthography) Osstralia.

Actual Australians, hearing of this debate, argued for a third way.

“I agree that Australia should not be pronounced Orestralia,” said the Reverend GE Hale, a lecturer in public speaking at the Workers’ Educational Association of Adelaide.

“But neither should it be pronounced Osstralia.”

For Hale, there was a third way — closer to Orestralia, but without stress on the first syllable. Orstralia.

That this great country had not settled on a single pronunciation of its own name, even 30 years after Federation, didn’t seem to faze its residents.

On the contrary: there is some evidence to suggest that speakers of Australian English used these variant pronunciations as a handy form of social marker.

In his autobiography, the writer Hal Porter observed that he was “an unmistakable Australian, albeit of the Awstralian rather than the Osstralian variety”.

Porter’s remarks on the Australian accent, written in 1963, neatly mirror today’s anxieties around pronunciation.

So? How do you pronounce? Having received my graduate degree in Applied Linguists I’ll tell you it doesn’t matter. Language is as language does but maybe you think one way is right and the others are silly. So are you an Osstralia gal, an Orestralia gal or an Orstralia gal?

Hmmm?