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How Australians use hypocoristics

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Matt Smith:

Welcome to a La Trobe University podcast. I'd be your host Matt Smith and Australian English has become distinctive in the short time it's had to develop, notably in the way in which we use our slang. Dr Evan Kidd is a Charles La Trobe research fellow in La Trobe University's School of Psychological Science. He's been studying how we use slang and why.

Evan Kidd:

We're looking at a particular form of Australian English that's quite pervasive in the local dialect. These are called hypocoristics or hypo-coristics depending on how you're going to pronounce it. We call them various other things like clippies or diminutives and these are forms like Tassie for Tasmania, povo for poverty or poverty-stricken, and pav for pavlova. These occur in pretty much every dialect of English but are very, very common in Australian English. So we're interested in them because of the fact that they're pervasive. But we're also interested in the functions that they serve amongst speakers of Australian English. So we're asking the very basic question – why would you use them? What context would you use them? And what's their function?

Matt Smith:

Is it something that you've found common throughout Australia?

Evan Kidd:

There've been anecdotal reports over the years, primarily in the linguistics literature that have argued that they are very common. There have been very few controlled studies.

Matt Smith:

How did you go about testing that sort of thing?

Evan Kidd:

In the first instance, what we wanted to do was just see how many of these particular forms people knew. A colleague of mine in Tasmania, or Tassie, as it were, Nina Kemp and I simply asked people from the age of 17 to, I think it was 85, so we got a very broad age range, to produce as many of these diminutive or hypocoristic forms as they could in ten minutes. And so we ended up with literally well over a thousand, and in fact the current estimate by Roly Sussex at the University of Queensland, who has a dictionary of them coming out – he argues that there are about four thousand of them that are used in the language, or have been recorded and used at one time in the language, because these forms tend to be used then sometimes fall out of the language quite quickly.

Matt Smith:

Did you notice any diminutives that were common to different age groups or were there some that were known across the entire spectrum there?

Evan Kidd:

Yes, so in particular, certain forms that denote sort of semantic classes that might be important to particular age groups are going to be used from 17 to say, 30. You get lots of forms like preggers, for pregnant, not that they're all going to be pregnant of course but these are things that they know or are concerned about, and you don't get them in the, for instance, 60 to 70 year olds. I guess they probably may have used it at one point in time or a form that denoted that concept at one point in time, but they didn't particularly provide them when we were asking. So what you get when you do these kinds of studies is, people will provide the words that they probably use and the words that they probably use that are about topics that are important to them. But we also found that there were differences in the use of the particular endings that people use – they varied with age. So for instance, words like povo, and wino, dero, ambo, were more often used by older people. It tended to be like 40 plus people would use them much more often than people who were say between 17 to 30. The 17 to 30 year olds used a lot more of what we call one syllable words, things like pav for instance, for pavlova. They didn't like to use the "o" ending as much as the one syllable ending, although they still did use them, but they used them a lot less than the older people. The "ie" ending, so things like truckie, or Tassie are used quite a lot – it is the highest frequency category of these types of forms.

Matt Smith:

Did you come across any terms that you weren't familiar with?

Evan Kidd:

This kind of aspect of language is quite flexible and creative, so you can use it for people's first names, their second names, you could be Robbo or Richo or Evo, for instance, for myself, and you can use them for common nouns, you can use them for place names, so Tassie is one, Melbs would be one for Melbourne, I think, that we found. Sydders for Sydney. You get a lot that are about local places and concepts, so for instance, for the MCG we say, the G. OK, and that's probably something local although people are probably going to know it right around the country. One of them that we have got for Melbourne is the Espie for the Esplanade Hotel in St Kilda. So, what we tended to find is that there are geographical differences in the use of these terms that map onto local landmarks or places that people probably frequent and talk about. In general across all of our sample that we looked at, the most common endings are the "ie" endings, so truckie, and the "o" ending. One argument is that these ending have different entomologies so the "ie" ending generally gets put onto words that have a Germanic root, they're words derived from Germanic languages, and the "o" ending tends to be put onto words that have a Latinic root, French or Italian words for instance, which ultimately would have been Latin in origin, so poverty-stricken for instance has a Latinic root, poverty at least, and that turns into povo. So, I guess there are linguistic explanations for these things that derive from the history of English, really.

Matt Smith:

Yeah, because I suppose in the other aspect, povvie would work as a diminutive.

Evan Kidd:

Yeah, but we don't say it. But there are instances where you do have some forms that do take both of the "ie" and the "o" endings and they're in free variation.

Matt Smith:

So, do you find that people use them in different situations? And were people actually able to use them naturally when you were testing them?

Evan Kidd:

The initial study that we did, we just gave people a sheet of paper and said, generate as many of these as you can, and everyone came up with at least 8 or 9 in ten minutes. Some people came up with well over 30. So it seems to be that this aspect of Australian English is quite available to most people, even if they don't use them. We don't actually know because we simply asked them to write them down. We don't know if they actually use them or not. If you listen on the tram or the train, you see that people use at least some of them, even if they don't litter their everyday speech with them. One good example is Salvos. Salvos stands for Salvation Army, but people don't actually know that any more, particularly younger people, because they now advertise themselves as the Salvos rather than the Salvation Army and even on their signage it says "Salvos". But that's an example of the diminutive form. When we started doing these studies though, we were really interested in why people might use them but this is what we'd call a lower register I guess. To use them with people who you'd probably know. It would be quite weird if you were, say, in a job interview and you started using what is effectively a form of slang. We had a working hypothesis that if these are going to be used, and if they're used so pervasively in Australian English, then there has to be some positive function for them. There has to be a reason why people use them a lot and why they have emerged in the language, and the current estimate is that they probably emerged in the language in the 1800s but only really gained a lot of ground last century. Our working hypothesis was that these have a social cohesion function by which I mean, when you use them you're pretty much saying to your conversational partner, I like you enough to use these types of forms, by using them I'm indicating to you that we have a level of friendship that allows us to talk in a lower register. It's very hard to find whether this social cohesion function actually exists, because naturally when people use them in an artificial environment, say in an experiment, they tend to be considered quite unusual. When we've conducted experiments where we've tried to get whether or not these diminutive forms do have a social cohesion function, what we've found is that when people hear them being used by others, they tend to rate them quite low on high status personality features such as, for instance, intelligence, but they rate them higher on more warm type emotional features of people, like approachability, or friendliness. And so this seems to map onto what you'd think of as an Australian stereotype, really, this rough, friendly person who probably isn't that educated or intelligent, the kid of stereotypical Australian that people like Paul Hogan have really made their careers on.

Matt Smith:

But how much of it is uniquely Australian, because I do know that some people go out of their way to evoke that sort of impression. Politicians use it quite frequently, and I was listening to Triple J yesterday and the news came on and the newsreader, who had a formal kind of professional news reading voice just dropped in, out of nowhere, yesterday arvo. And it was out of tone with the rest of the news report. So I imagine that some people use it to try and make the impression that they are authentic Australian that way.

Evan Kidd:

I guess the reason probably why you were surprised was the context in which it was used. So anyone is surprised when a politician uses these types of language because they're the people who are meant to directly contravene these kind of stereotype. For instance, as being unintelligent. You hope your politicians are going to be very intelligent but I'll leave that up to the public to decide whether or not they actually are. And in a news report, what you are expecting is a polished, articulate, presentation of the news that probably doesn't contain any kind of slang in it. So that is the reason for your surprise. Now, why would you use it in those types of circumstances? I think the reason why politicians often use it is to gain cachet with the electorate because let's face it, these days it tends to be a bit of a popularity contest where you can see that the political parties take quite a lot of notice of these popularity polls. If they're wanting to gain cachet with what they see as middle Australia, then if they see that these people are using these forms, or they might use these forms, then they want to appeal, or appear to be similar to those people, and by implication, hopefully getting their vote I'd imagine. So that's why they use them. The unfortunate thing is that sometimes it comes across as a bit forced, probably because of the context, and also potentially because of their accent, although I guess we'd probably be less surprised is Julia Gillard used it than say, for instance, Kevin Rudd, although the both of them have used it – Rudd used "fair suck of the sauce bottle" or something like that.

Matt Smith:

Yes, he did.

Evan Kidd:

Which itself was quite unusual and gained a lot of media interest.

Matt Smith:

So how much of this language is uniquely Australian? It's an important part of our identity but is it something that only we hold?

Evan Kidd:

The process of forming these diminutives is not unique to Australian English. You find these forms that are used in a more restricted sense, say for instance in British English and probably other forms of even newer Englishes like Singaporean English. They are more pervasive in New Zealand English than the other forms of Englishes but I'm not too sure if they are used in New Zealand to the same extent as they are in Australia. So the unique aspect in Australian English is really the concepts for which we formed these types of words and also the context in which we use them.

Matt Smith:

That's all the time we've got for the La Trobe University podcast today. If you have any questions, comments or feedback about this podcast, or any other, you can send us an email at podcast@latrobe.edu.au. Evan Kidd, thank you for your time today.

Evan Kidd:

Thanks, Matt.