They need to weigh in on some of these questions, otherwise I'm just going to assume they say "crikey" and "good on yer" and "shrimp on the barbie" all the time.
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3+1 I hope that maybe we do. But it's a numbers game, I would suspect. We're likely to see members in some vague relation to their population size, I suppose (might not be the case at all. I don't know ...). We don'talways know where everyone's from, of course. I'm not sure where I'm from ...– Araucaria - Not here any more.Jan 3, 2017 at 23:35
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You forgot to mention Marmite and "G'day mate!"– PeterJan 5, 2017 at 8:44
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1@Peter actually they do say "G'day mate", like all the time. I had an Aussie coworker who held an informal contest to see which American among us could say it properly, with the most natural accent. The winner got a jar of Vegemite.– AndrewJan 5, 2017 at 22:44
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2I feel like city dwellers don't use 'g'day' that much, 'good morning' etc. are used much more common. People who live in small towns use it a lot more, and it's used more common among men, such as builders, or when male friends go fishing/ to the beach...)– EXLJan 5, 2017 at 23:45
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@EmmaXL well my coworker was from Tasmania, which might have explained much of his odd behavior.– AndrewJan 5, 2017 at 23:49
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5@Andrew Vegemite? That's a really interesting usage of the word "winner".– CodeswitcherJan 6, 2017 at 7:37
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4@Codeswitcher 5 years later I still have the jar :)– AndrewJan 6, 2017 at 15:52
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I noticed this comment yesterday, and it reminded me of this question.– J.R. ModJan 10, 2017 at 0:57
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2@J.R. only one Aussie comment out of twenty. Shame, I guess the drop-bears got them.– AndrewJan 10, 2017 at 5:51
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Andrew: Wow, the glass is half-empty, eh? There may be 20 comments there, but many have posted two or three times, so there are really only 10 or 11 commenters. Given that the population of Australia is about 23 million, that's actually pretty close to e representative sample. It's certainly more than the "never" in your question title.– J.R. ModJan 10, 2017 at 9:48
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Australians never say 'shrimp' on the barbie and some rarely say 'crikey' and 'good on yer'. I comment sometimes - my username is Sydney and my pic is a closeup of the Sydney Opera House: guess where I'm from!– SydneyJan 13, 2017 at 21:43
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@Sydney Ok but the drop-bears are real, right?– AndrewJan 13, 2017 at 21:51
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Oh yes, absolutely!– SydneyJan 14, 2017 at 2:52
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There aren't a lot of Australians on ELL because it's well known that Australians speak the best English in the world! [citation needed]– CJ DennisJan 21, 2017 at 1:27
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>>How come I never see any Aussies on here? Coz we're all asleep when you mob are awake. ;-) Oh, and 'good on yer' these days is just 'onya'.– mcalexFeb 24, 2017 at 11:47
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2 Answers
Well, we have @jimsug and @AndrewGrimm among our regular contributors, looking at self-reported locations visible on the Users tab.
If the concern is about global representation of Englishes, I am more concerned about our failure to recruit participants (either questioners or answerers) from the Philippines, the Caribbean, and sub-Saharan Africa (esp. South Africa, Nigeria, and Kenya). For that matter, we don't seem to have any Irish among the top 100 participants (by reputation points) either.
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It's a shame, really. I agree it would be nice to have full diversity.– AndrewJan 3, 2017 at 22:52
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Yeah, there's only one irish-english question, and not even a tag for any African, Pacific, or Caribbean English varieties. Jan 4, 2017 at 0:29
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11So maybe we should come up with an ad that asks folks to come to ELL and share their flavor of English and see if we can get it into rotation on some other SE sites. Maybe travel.se would be a good place to start.– ColleenVJan 4, 2017 at 14:02
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Hear hear! By the way, I'm another Australian (maybe I should put that in my profile), and I haven't really noticed there being less of us than I'd expect. Jan 16, 2017 at 16:36
We do weigh in on questions, but we avoid referring to throwing prawns on the barbie because it is rarely relevant to the question.
We (I) also tend not to use "In Australia we use the word like this ..." very often because generally the British use English the same as us, and it's better to link to the OED than the (much less reputable and less free) Macquarie Dictionary that we have down under.
Also, we tend to get moderated to oblivion, due to our tendency to drop a certain word quite casually that is fine amongst mates, but shocks other people.
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