The weirdest Aussie language oddity for me is their habit of calling redheads “Bluey.” No one knows how that started.
Two schools of thought on that one. Either:
A) Australians are a bunch of contrary bastards, so red = blue, or
B) Redheads are supposedly particularly short tempered, this much more likely to get into a fight aka a blue. Hence Bluey.
It’s just another example of perverse reversal. Never heard of a bald man nicknamed “Curly” or a short fella known as “Stretch”?
It’s cuz they live on the bottom of the planet. Everything’s upside down.
Or Lofty for a shortarse, and Midge for a tall bloke? 
Re the Auntie thing: Auntie is a familiar term, for those who are or have been mostly present in your life. For example, my Auntie Nancy died recently, and my Auntie Evelyn died many years ago (but within my lifetime).
But I have many Aunts who died many, MANY years ago, before I was born, and they are not my Aunties. They are Aunts.
This is from a non-indigenous perspective of course.
(And do you know, if you look at the word aunt or auntie long enough, it looks terribly strange…:D)
Indeed, but some people, at least in the UK, use “chuff” as a noun to mean something completely different.
I always thought factor B was the other way round. That is, if you got two Blueys together, what you ended up with was a big blue…
My dad has worked with some guys for 30 years who don’t know his first name. He’ll always and forever be Bluey to them, despite the fact that his hair has long since turned white and mostly fallen out.
My kids, on the other hand, get “ranga”, as “Bluey” is rather old school. Ranga is short for orangutan (similar hair colour and all).
In fact, dad was greeted at work one day with “Hey Bluey! Saw you out walking with a couple of rangas yesterday!”.
Into which provence do you go? Making statements sound like questions is something very typical of Ontario. When I think of valley speak, it’s not so much the accent as things like “gag me with a spoon.” (kind of 1980’s perception, I suppose).
Firstly, you need to understand that there is no such thing as “uptalk” in general Australian speech, any more than real Irish people talk like stage leprechauns.
What you’re calling “Australian uptalk” is an affectation of the young and the foolish. It comes directly from US “Valley Girls”, and pretty much everyone with an IQ above retard level grows out of it by their twenties. Plenty of Australian teenagers never take it up in the first place.
It is affected by actors on Australian TV soaps. Affected. It is not their natural speech. Presumably the producers of Australian soaps believe it makes their actors “sound young”.
Really, you should not assume there is anything realistic about Australian soaps, right down to the accents.
Heh. I knew an Irishman who went ballistic if you said “Top o’ the mornin’ to you” to him. We used to do it all the time. 
OP here. As mentioned, I was watching a reality show about border officers. Nearly every professional in the show spoke with a rising, or uptalk or whatever it’s called. It really is an observable speech pattern in Australia.
On tellie it is, they are also asking questions so yeah it would be there. But as said before it is as common as a Canadian say “eh”. So not common but not unusual.
Is this linguistically established? Don’t forget that uptalk or something very like it is also a native part of several English regional accents.
Yeah, right, Americans invented everything, even the things you disapprove of :rolleyes:
Honestly, it’s a perfectly ordinary unexceptionable pattern of speech in my neck of the woods. It’s how people talked when I was a kid, and I’m 44. My classmates commented on it when I moved to Scotland in 1981 … we didn’t even know there was a “Valley” at that point. I just now finished an episode of Orphan Black with a Belfast pensioner lady doing the exact same thing - sounds perfectly normal to my ears.
There’s nothing morally upright about going down at the end of every sentence. Some people do, some people don’t. Yes, it does have a semantic meaning … rising tone is more an invitation-to-connect, more emotional. Falling tone is more laying-down-the-law, being authoritative. Very roughly. Nothing wrong with either. No doubt it sounds weird to someone who hasn’t grown up with it. shrug. Americans saying ‘lever’, ‘tomato’ and ‘herb’ sounds weird to me, so what?
Down here in the mid-Atlantic states of the US we have this funny thing where t becomes d in a stressed syllable, so we pronounce it as “day-duh”. This is the same thing that is happening in pretty = “pri-dee” and when we talk about the well-known US-based religion The Church of Jesus Christ of “Ladder”-Day Saints.
Fer sure, like, totally. Gag me with a spoon? Seriously, Californians so talk funny. As if. Also, they seem to have a lot of trouble, like, totally not being able to tell the difference between Don and Dawn?
Some Australians say haitch for H, so they’re all right by me.
:). Haitch has resurged in the last 20 years or so. Pretty soon it will be universal. Makes elderly teachers swoon…
I heard an analysis of uptalk and its perception. It found that, yes, uptalk was perceived as being used by someone lacking confidence or authority, but it suggested that any characteristic of speech that becomes associated with young women is given the same set of negative perceptions. In other words, it’s not uptalk itself that makes you sound like you’re lacking confidence, but because it marks you as sounding like a young woman. In other words, it’s not because of the speech characteristic itself, but because of sexism.