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Here’s a few a remember from my time at McMurdo Station
- The fry, fried > The accumulation of brain fry, mental fog, apathy etc that builds over time accumulated on ice especially during winter.
- The CRUD > a general cold everyone eventually gets and then is immune to on the base. Usually there’s a lot of congestion or ‘crud’. Probably exacerbated by the volcanic dust and dry climate.
- Ice Wife (or husband) A monogamous couple but only on the ice. May or may not be involved in other relationships off ice.
Both uses of “crud” and “fried” are parts of the lexicon where I grew up, nowhere near Antarctica. I suppose they must(?) have been imported from somewhere, but neither seems very unique to McMurdo.
Crud is widely used. My kid's pediatrician and my PCP both use it to describe a general cold or cold symptoms. I'd say it has been in general use for about decade.
I found none of these in the pdf linked elsewhere[1]. But perhps these are less formal, sort of mcmurdo’s urbandictionary?
[1]: https://monoskop.org/images/8/8b/Hince_Bernadette_Antarctic_...
Ice Wife reminds me of Chinese migrant workers who form similar relationships on construction sites during development projects. Looks like this phenomenon is cross culture.
Completely unrelated, but there supposedly was this "grunge speak" English being spoken the 90's:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grunge_speak
https://www.kexp.org/read/2017/11/15/kexp-exclusive-intervie...
At least some people thought it was.
On the other hand, there was definitely a pop punk accent.
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/i-made-a-linguistics-p...
Only cob nobblers thought this was real.
Grunge speak was conceived as a hoax.
I spent some time looking for a video documenting the actual accent. Couldn't find one. But this tiktok has some examples of how the pronunciations differ from American English. They're very subtle https://www.tiktok.com/@human.1011/video/7257164158033038635
Couldn't watch that on my browser, but yt-dlp works. Mirror, in case someone is having the same problem:
https://celsoazevedo.com/files/2024/human1011_antarctic_acce...
It seems like people come and go a lot so I'm curious how it would be the same Antarctic English described in the Wikipedia article. This video talks about an experiment where it seems like an accent was formed by a new group of people.
I wish they had actual recordings of the comparison instead of a non-Antarctic guy blabbering about it.
Another video here; doesn't really say anything more https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uHKGErnN9W8
PDF of the full Antarctic English dictionary is here:
https://monoskop.org/images/8/8b/Hince_Bernadette_Antarctic_...
If you want some fun there is also https://fr.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taafien (the article is in French as it’s a French jargon).
Speaking of weird French varieties, the Foreign Legion developed its own idioms and accent, from the wide variety of languages of its soldiers. I don’t have a handy Wiki link, but there are several examples on YouTube.
[edit] having worked there, seeing “Shadock” being used for “Personnel du Commissariat à l'énergie atomique et aux énergies alternatives” really made my day. Now I know how to call former colleagues!
I always wonder about french accents. Like in half of Switzerland you speak at least 10 widely different Swiss German accents but there doesn't appear to be such a thing for the french half.
Took me a while after arriving at Kerguelen to work out who all the people with the weird-sounding job titles were.
IIRC "Disker" (the head of the district) sounds like a slang word for DJ, so his official residence is the "discothèque".
> Dead-Penguin Tours (a type of tour in the late summer after penguins have abandoned weak chicks to die, leaving their bodies in popular tourist destinations, which causes grief in tourists)
I went on one of those and never realized I was supposed to feel bad about that. Am I a terrible person?
>Words include tabulars (large flat-topped southern icebergs that break off from the Antarctic ice sheet and are usually over ten miles long)
You must've derived your username from those trip(s) too I bet.
A lot of people get upset when they see dead animals, especially if they're not used to it, especially if they're animals they perceive as cute.
Grief might be too strong a word.
I don't know that you're a terrible person, but I'd say you have a characteristic I'll leave others to identify, because what you write sounds like you consider emotional reactions to be prescribed enactments rather than automatic reactions. You're not supposed to feel bad as if according to some rules, but most people automatically would.
It occurred to me that there is already such a thing as a modern Israeli accent given how recently a lot of the people moved there from all over the world and resurrected a dead language. Maybe it doesn't take that long.
This isn't even comparable. You are talking about the language invented 100 years ago, which is the mother tongue for many people now, they literally are born and raised speaking Hebrew. Of course they will have some sort of accent. On an individual human level, you might have some slight English accent by the end of the day full of speaking in English, after switching to your native language.
Antarctic English might be a bit overhyped because of how much of a curiosity it seems (and definitely it's unfair to call it a separate language), but the point is that people tend to pick up some speaking patterns from other people they spent last 3 months with. It deosn't seem very surprising to me, but it is ridiculous to explain that on basis of an accent of a country, which although might have been artificially created very recently on the global timescale, still exists longer than most its inhabitants live.
A similar thing happened/is happening in Europe, as a lot of non-native speakers interact with each other: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euro_English.
I wonder how many children are born and grow up there? My guess would be, not many. A lot of the formation of new languages occurs via pidgin languages when children naturally incorporate a multitude of vocabulary and accents from disparate origins.
Born: 11. Grow up? Zero.
Pretty sure when you’re pregnant there you get shipped off ice. They pregnancy test you if you do a winter over. They’re not equipped to delivery babies there and pregnancies don’t happen quickly.
I remember how few years ago a Linux update broke my system because they added en_IL locale. Which, apparently, meant that someone believed that English spoken by expats in Israel was different enough from the rest of English variants in the world.
But then it turned out that it sort of made sense. Especially since some services in Israel can also be provided in English, they need a locale to deal with stuff like calendar, currency etc.
I don't think though anyone recognizes the language spoken by English speakers in Israel as a separate language. Even though it's usually augmented with hard-to-translate Hebrew words that relate to local realities (eg. "oleh" which is usually translated as "repatriate" (noun), but it only applies to those who repatriate to Israel, not any other country, or "ascent" (a pilgrim, only in religious context) again, only in the context of coming to Israel or more specifically, Jerusalem).
There are also plenty of second and third generation English speakers who depart very far from the dialect of English their parents came with. Usually, the drift is towards American English, with a lot of borrowings from Hebrew (and by proxy, from Arabic). So, I don't know, maybe at some point there will be an actual Israeli dialect in the same way.
I went ten times to the South Pole (in Austral summer) from 1997 to 2011, stopping in McMurdo each way for a period ranging from hours to days.
While there definitely is jargon in the US Antarctic program (and presumably overlapping-but-distinct sets of jargon for the New Zealand, Australia, and Great Britain programs), it seems a stretch to call it "Antarctic English." Pronunciation varies a lot more from program to program and even from participant-to-participant (scientists tend to be a fairly international bunch) than the subtle single-station per-season continental drift cited in the papers referenced in the Wikipedia article.
That said, I still find the jargon entertaining:
- Skua - discarded items that can be usefully repurposed by someone else
- Toast / toasty - burnt out, irritable, need to go home...
- Beaker - scientist/engineer working as a "grantee" (funded by NSF scientific grant) rather than by the contracting company which handles most day-to-day operations
- Freshies - precious, sometimes rare (especially at places like Pole) fresh fruits and vegetables
and finally
- Pole - The South Pole. Because those two extra words are so much work to actually say out loud....
[edit: fix typos]
Donga is Australian slang, so it is used in other varieties of English.
Was going to say the example sound like they could be Aussie speak / humour. “The Ice” lol!
Can anyone help answer or point in the direction of where to learn more about what/why humans begin to mimic and adopt other characteristics or full words of other languages? The reason I ask is I inherited/learned from my Mom this thing where within a couple of hours of being around another language or accent will unconsciously start adopting parts of it to a noticeably embarrassing degree. I'm at the point now where I am aware enough about this trait that I can tolerate myself but I have always been left wondering why some people seem to change how they speak faster and more drastically than others. My uneducated guess the answer I seek is somewhere to be found in the studies of human evolutionary biology and childhood development.
What's "sleeping chamber"? Is that the same thing as bedroom?
> In addition, the tourism industry has terms for different types of tourist encounters, such as Kodak poisoning (what happens when many tourists take photographs of the same site)
This was incorporated into the show Joe Pera Talks With You[1], where a new kid begins in his class that was raised on research base in Antarctica. This is the only case I know of this being mentioned in any popular media. Would highly recommend the show, there isn't really anything like it.
Pictairn island english is the wildest though.
I wish the antarctic was accessible to common people. Why migrate to Mars outer space when we have antarctica.
Is this really anything more than jargon? Seems a bit overwrought/self-indulgent to call it much more.
> On Wikipedia, notability is a test used by editors to decide whether a given topic warrants its own article.
What if this is just one big practical joke?
Sounds like this is Antarctic _American_ English. The British jargon is quite different.
The fact that Anglophone countries don't have language regulator bodies id mind-boggling.
Basically schools marking down your work for mistakes can't refer to anything as the source of truth other than "this private entity, sometimes in a foreign country, published a book that says so" or just "it's common knowledge".
Literally geologists but with more temporary rocks.
How much of it is it still relevant? With today's travel I guess there's substantial turnaround in the staff there.
So my naive couch potato thinking is... Nicknames? Sure, The Ice, Big Eye. I can believe it.
Different pronunciation? Well, likely the international English, same as in your big mega corp HQ.
Not related to Antartic English but I am a proponent of the theory introduced by Professor Faarlund [1] that English should be categorized as a North Germanic language like Swedish and not West Germanic like Dutch and German.
[1] "Language of the Vikings" by Faarlund
"Spoken primarily by scientists and workers ..."
Unless those scientists are born in Antarctica, they are not native speakers; they learned English elsewhere.
This doesn't sound like a true variant of English, but more of a cant/argot type of thing.