Australian English is becoming well known for its quirky, larrikin, idiosyncratic creativeness, as can be seen from the growing number of books on Australian colloquialisms and slang (e.g. the Macquarie Australian slang dictionary, 2004), and on the dozens of websites on "Aussie slang" for travellers, tourists, and the linguistically curious. Phrases like flat out like a lizard drinking for "to be very busy" or thin as six feet of pump water, familiar to most Australians, strike other users of English by their originality and word-play.

A major strand in this intense creative layer of Australian English belongs to hypocoristics, also known as diminutives. These are the shortened or modified forms of words like ambo for "ambulance officer", fierie or firie (the spelling is typically unstable) for "fire officer", the older and now dated beaut as a cover-all term of approval, or pav for pavlova.

Jane Simpson"s 2001 paper analyzed hypocoristic Australian place names like Brizzie "Brisbane", The Isa or just Isa "Mount Isa", Rotto "Rottnest Island" (W.A.), and Gabba "Wooloongabba" (Qld), usually in the form The Gabba for the cricket ground of that name. There are more than a thousand hypocoristics for place names in Australia, unlike other English-speaking countries, where place names are somehow above such indulgent, and perhaps disrespectful, word-play.

But Australian English goes much further than this. Most hotels have hypocoristic names which are the default with their regulars, and with locals who know the area well: The Wellington Hotel in Brisbane is predictably The Wello, The Bouldecombe Hotel in NSW is The Bouldie, Young and Jackson's in Melbourne is The YJ, hotels called The Criterion are variously The Cry or The Crit, and The Bavarian Tavern in Hobart is The Bav Tav.

Sportspersons are often so honoured: AB for the cricketer Alan Border, Warnie for Shane Warne, the swimmer Ian Thorpe (Thorpie, Thorpedo), the footballers Alex Jezaulenko (Jezza) and Jason Ackermanis (Acker). A few politicians are part of the pantheon, but only a few: Little Johnnie (the Prime Minister, John Howard) or the former Premier of Queensland, Gossie (Wayne Goss).

To this we can add common nouns like clippie "tram conductor", muddie "mud crab", schoolies (the school leavers' annual week of celebration), reffo "refugee", cab-sav "cabernet sauvignon" (wine), rhodo "rhododendron", fisho "fish merchant" and K "kilometre".

The database that I have been collecting, with the help of Jane Simpson and David Nash, now stands at well over 4,000 headwords. These include around 1600 proper nouns, 2350 common nouns, 90 verbs (to divvie up the spoils), and 200 adjectives (para for paralytic or paranoid). Some of these, like pollie "politician", are accepted into our national dictionaries. Others are still almost wholly part of the colloquial, spoken language.
Some words have multiple alternative hypocoristics. Apart from older examples like Commo/Commie "Communist", we find "sandwich" with sammie, sanger, sarnie, sando, sambo, sanbo, sango, sandie, sangie, sammo, sammidge and sangwidge; or "afternoon" represented by arvie, arvo, sarvo, aftie, arve, arv and afto.

Overseas visitors are often puzzled by this apparently profligate creativity, which seems to some to suggest children"s language. But hypocoristics have some deep-seated relevance for Australian speakers. Two of the principle features are solidarity and playfulness.

Wierzbicka (1984) has identified hypocoristics as a solidarity code, a way of speaking which marks the in-group belonging of Australians. We use hypocoristics among ourselves as a way of indicating a good-humoured, but also quite serious, sharing of social space. Foreigners using hypocoristics can sound intrusive: hypocoristics require Australian phonology to be consistent and fully solidaristic. Furthermore, not using customary hypocoristics will sound formal, stilted or unnatural: once I have established with a mechanically gifted friend that I know enough about a carburettor to call it a carbie, it would be inconsistent to use the full form carburettor.

A second and equally deep-running layer of meaning in hypocoristics has to do with playfulness, sometimes wilful; with the Australian laconic leg-pull, the tendency not to take ourselves too seriously. We play with language creatively, and share this playfulness, at all levels of society. What other country would use pollie for both politicians and parrots? Or aspro for associate professor; barbie for barbiturates, Barbie dolls and barbecues; or flattie for flathead (a fish), flat-soled shoes, flatmate, flat tyre, or a flat-bottomed boat? Such homonyms are part of word-play. They seldom cause problems of communication, and when there are collisions, they present welcome opportunities for punning. I have called this tendency "ludicity", from the Latin ludum "game" (Sussex 2004).

Hypocoristics are a creative and open-ended part of the morphology of Australian English. The earliest example is croppie, a convict with a cropped head, reported from 1800 in Amanda Laugesen's Convict words (2002). Among the more recent is Peej for PJ, the initials of one of the characters in Channel 7"s series Blue Heelers.

There are two lists of hypocoristics on the Web: Jane Simpson's list of placenames at the University of Sydney: and a subset of my own database.

Hypocoristics are found in all Englishes, especially in personal names. But no other English runs Australian English even close when it comes to creativity and usage of hypocoristics, which are pushing ever more vigorously into the written language as well.

REFERENCES
Simpson, J. 2001. "Hypocoristics of place-names in Australian English" in P. Collins & D. Blair (eds.) Varieties of English: Australian English John Benjamins Amsterdam, Philadelphia: 89-112.

Sussex, R. 2004. Abstand, ausbau, creativity and ludicity in Australian English. Australian Journal of Linguistics 24, 1, 3-19.

Wierzbicka, A. 1984. Diminutives and depreciatives: semantic representation for derivational categories. Quaderni di Semantica 5.1: