"Barracking," "sheilas" and "shouts": How the Irish influenced Australian English. Plus, what makes "NASA" different from "FBI." | Subscribe to the newsletter for regular updates. | Watch my LinkedIn Learning writing course. | Peeve Wars card game. | Grammar Girl books. | HOST: Mignon Fogarty | VOICEMAIL: 833-214-GIRL (833-214-4475) | Grammar Girl is part of the Quick and Dirty Tips podcast network. | Theme music by Catherine Rannus at beautifulmusic.co.uk. | Links: https://www.quickanddirtytips.com/ https://www.quickanddirtytips.com/podcasts https://www.quickanddirtytips.com/subscribe https://www.tiktok.com/@therealgrammargirl http://twitter.com/grammargirl http://facebook.com/grammargirl http://facebook.com/grammargirl http://instagram.com/thegrammargirl https://www.linkedin.com/company/grammar-girl
"Barracking," "sheilas" and "shouts": How the Irish influenced Australian English. Plus, what makes "NASA" different from "FBI."
| Subscribe to the newsletter for regular updates.
| Watch my LinkedIn Learning writing course.
| HOST: Mignon Fogarty
| VOICEMAIL: 833-214-GIRL (833-214-4475)
| Grammar Girl is part of the Quick and Dirty Tips podcast network.
| Theme music by Catherine Rannus at beautifulmusic.co.uk.
| Links:
https://www.quickanddirtytips.com/
https://www.quickanddirtytips.com/podcasts
https://www.quickanddirtytips.com/subscribe
https://www.tiktok.com/@therealgrammargirl
http://twitter.com/grammargirl
http://facebook.com/grammargirl
http://facebook.com/grammargirl
http://instagram.com/thegrammargirl
https://www.linkedin.com/company/grammar-girl
Grammar Girl here. I’m Mignon Fogarty, and you can think of me as your friendly guide to the English language. We talk about writing, history, rules, and other cool stuff.
Today, in honor of St. Patrick’sDay, we’ll talk about how the Irish language influence the Australian language, and then we’ll talk about abbreviations, acronyms, and initialisms.
This segment is by Howard Manns and Kate Burridge
Australian English decidedly finds its origins in British English. But when it comes to chasing down Irish influence, there are – to paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld – some knowun knowuns, some unknowun knowuns, and a bucket load of furphies, a name for rumors or false stories.
Larrikins, sheilas and Aboriginal Irish speakers
The first Irish settlers, around half of whom were reputedly Irish language speakers, were viewed with suspicion and derision. This is reflected in the early Australian English words used to describe those who came from Patland (a blend of Paddy and Land).
The Irish were guided by paddy’s lantern (the moon); their homes adorned with Irish curtains (cobwebs); and their hotheadedness saw them have a paddy or paddy out. These Irish were said to follow Rafferty’s Rules – an eponym from the surname Rafferty – which meant “no rules at all”.
More than a few Irish were larrikins. In his book Austral English, E.E. Morris reports that in 1869, an Irish sergeant Dalton charged a young prisoner with “a-larrr-akin about the streets” (an Irish pronunciation of larking, or “getting up to mischief”). When asked to repeat by the magistrate, Dalton said: “a larrikin, your Worchup”.
This Irish origin of larrikin had legs for many years, and perhaps still does. Unfortunately, here we have our first furphy, with more compelling evidence linking larrikin to a British dialect word meaning “mischievous or frolicsome youth”.
But if larrikin language is anything to go by, these youths went way beyond mischievous frolicking – jump someone’s liver out, put the boot in, stonker, rip into, go the knuckle on and weigh into are just some items from the larrikin’s lexicon of fighting words.
With the Dalton furphy, though, we see evidence of something called “epenthesis”, the insertion of extra sounds. Just as Dalton adds a vowel after his trilled “r” in a-larrr-akin, many Aussies add a vowel to words like “known” and “film” (making them sound like knowun and filum) – and here we see a potential influence of the Irish accent on Australian English.
In contrast to larrikin, the word sheila is incontrovertibly Irish. Popular belief derives it from the proper name, Sheila, used as the female counterpart to Paddy, a general reference to Irish males.
Author Dymphna Lonergan, in her book Sounds Irish, prefers to derive it from Irish Gaelic síle, meaning “homosexual”, noting Sheila wasn’t a particularly popular Irish name as it began to appear down under.
Significantly though, St Patrick had a wife (or mother) named Sheila, and the day after St Paddy’s Day was once celebrated as Sheelah’s Day. So, Sheila was something of a celebrity.
Barrack is another likely Irish-inspired expression. A range of competing origins have been posited for this one, including the Aboriginal Wathawarung word borak, meaning “no, not”, and links to the Victorian military barracks in Melbourne.
But the most likely origin is the Northern Irish English barrack, meaning “to brag, be boastful of one’s fighting powers”. The word has since sprouted opposite uses – Australian barrackers shout noisy support for somebody, while British barrackers shout in criticism or protest.
Perhaps surprisingly to many, the Irish were the first Europeans some Australian Aboriginal tribes encountered.
This contact is evident in the presence of Irish words in some Aboriginal languages. For instance, in the Ngiyampaa language of New South Wales, the word for shoe is pampuu, likely linked to a kind of shoe associated with the Aran Islands in Ireland, pampúta.
Didgeridoos, chooks and shouts: An Irish language perspective
Lonergan argues that more attention should be directed to this sort of Irish Gaelic influence.
Lonergan points, for example, to archival evidence linking the origin of didgeridoo to an outsider’s perception of how the instrument sounds, questioning the degree to which the sound corresponds to the word.
As a counter-argument, she notes an Irish word dúdaire meaning “trumpeter or horn-blower”, as well as Irish and Scots-Gaelic dubh, [do, meaning] “black” and dúth, meaning “native”. She observes that Irish and Scots-Gaelic speakers first encountering the instrument might well have called it dúdaire dubh or dúdaire dúth (pronounced respectively “doodereh doo” or “doojerreh doo”).
Similar arguments are made for a number of other words traditionally viewed as having British English origins.
The Australian National Dictionary sees chook (also spelled chuck) as linked to a Northern English/Scottish variation of “chick”. However, Lonergan notes this is phonetically the same word (spelled tioc) the Irish would have used when calling chickens to feed (tioc, tioc, tioc).
Another potential influence also comes from the transference of Irish meaning to English words. For example, the Australian National Dictionary is unclear as to the exact origin of shout, meaning “to buy a round of drinks”, but Lonergan links it to Irish working in the goldfields and an Irish phrase glaoch ar dheoch, “to call or shout for a drink”. glaoch - Irish Pronunciation Database https://www.teanglann.ie/en/fuaim/deoch
Lonergan posits that Irish miners translating to English might have selected “shout” rather than “call” – “shouting” could easily have spread to English speakers as a useful way to get a drink in a noisy Goldfields bar.
Good dollops of Irish in the melting pot
Irish influence on Australian English is much like the influence of the Irish on Australians themselves – less than you’d expect on the surface, but everywhere once you start looking.
And those with a soft spot for Irish English might feel better knowing that some of their bête noires are in fact Irish (haitch, youse, but, filum and knowun).
As Irish settlers entered the Australian melting pot, so too did a hearty dose of their language.
That segment was written by Howan Manns who is a Lecturer in Linguistics at Monash University and Kate Burridge who his a senior follow at the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies and Professor of Linguistics at Monash University. It first appeared on The Conversation, and appears here through a Creative Commons license.
Next, we’ll talk about the difference between abbreviations, acronyms, and initialisms.
Many people use the word acronym to describe any abbreviation made from the first letters of a string of words, but technically, they aren’t all acronyms. Sometimes they are called initialisms.
Acronyms
Let's back up. Any shortened form of a word is an abbreviation, for example, "etc." for "etcetera" and "Oct." for "October;" but acronyms are special kinds of abbreviations that can be pronounced as words, such as "NASA" (for “National Aeronautics and Space Administration”) and "OPEC" (for “Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries”). This makes acronyms a subset of abbreviations. All acronyms are abbreviations, but not all abbreviations are acronyms.
Initialisms
Initialisms are another type of abbreviation. They're often confused with acronyms because they are made up of letters, so they look similar, but they can't be pronounced as words. "FBI" and "CIA" are examples of initialisms because they're made up of the first letters of "Federal Bureau of Investigation" and "Central Intelligence Agency," respectively, but they aren't usually pronounced as words. Insiders sometimes call the FBI "fibby" and the CIA "see-uh," but most of the world says "F-B-I" and "C-I-A," so they are initialisms.
Overview
So remember:
Sometimes acronyms like "scuba" become so common they're accepted as words in their own right. "Scuba" was originally an acronym for "self-contained underwater breathing apparatus," but now dictionaries include it as a word.
ROFL?
Sometimes it's not clear whether a word is an initialism or an acronym because people say it different ways. Take the abbreviation you see on the Internet for "rolling on the floor laughing." It's ROFL. I always pronounce it "roffle" as if it were an acronym, but when I surveyed my Twitter friends, I found that about half of them pronounce all the letters: R-O-F-L. So to people like me it's an acronym, and to people who say the letters, it's an initialism.
I don't have a good answer for what to call words like that. I guess we should use the broader category and just refer to them as abbreviations..
Punctuation
You may be wondering whether you need to put periods after each letter in an acronym or initialism. There's no strict rule. Some publications put periods after each letter, arguing that because each letter is essentially an abbreviation for a word, periods are necessary. Other publications don't put periods after each letter, arguing that the copy looks cleaner without them, and that because they are made up of all capital letters, the fact that they are abbreviations is implied.
First Mention
Finally, when you're using any kind of abbreviation in a formal document, it's important to spell out the entire phrase the first time you use it and put the abbreviation in parentheses after the words so people know what your abbreviation means. This obviously doesn't apply to things like text messaging, but when you're writing in a professional way, you generally shouldn’t assume that people know what your abbreviation means unless it’s common in your industry or among your audience. Using abbreviations without defining them makes your writing sound jargony and insular.
When you're spelling out the phrase, the first letters aren't capitalized unless they would normally be capitalized. For example, if you're writing about a measurement called the “average daily volume” and you put "ADV" in parentheses after the phrase, you don't capitalize the first letters of "average daily volume" in the text even though you capitalize the letters in the abbreviation. The letters in the words are lowercase just as they would be if you were writing them and not introducing an initialism.
Finally, this week, I have a familect story from an old friend.
Nodding at the pancakes. [played listener voicemail]
Thanks, Marci. That made me laugh, and it was so nice to hear from you.
If you want to call with the story of your familect, a word your family and only your family uses, you can leave a voicemail at 83-321-4-GIRL. Call from a nice, quiet place, and I might play it on the show.
I’m Mignon Fogarty, better known as Grammar Girl.
Thanks to my audio engineer, Nathan Semes, and my editor Adam Cecil. Our assistant manager is Emily Miller, who has not yet lost at Wordle. Go, Emily! Our marketing and publicity assistant is Davina Tomlin, and our Ad Operations Specialist is Morgan Christiansen.
That’s all. Thanks for listening.