Ies with Ease

It's obvious that the Queen's English, Cockney, Canadian English, U.S. English, and Australian English are fantastically diverse languages (let's not even start on Indian English today morning).

But every now and then a new facet of the differences strikes me. Reading one small word in this article on an airport outbreak of war between two rival motorcycle gangles in Australia triggered that familiar "wait a minute..." feeling about our mutual (?) language.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090323/ap_on_re_au_an/as_australia_biker_brawl

Now, it seems there are already a lot of basic items in Australia that end in an "ee" sound, however spelled, whether it's a wallaby, a joey, or a budgie. In some cases though, those are shortenings of longer words (budgerigar) to a comfortable form. And comfortable forms have those ee's on the end more frequently than in U.S. English forms. Here in the U.S. an ie ending seems to have a connotation of something small, cute, childlike, harmless. Little Ann is Annie, little Rebecca is Becky, babies are ee's, and budgies are ee's, and hard core Star Trek fans struggle to be known as Trekkers instead of Trekkies in a desperate bid to be taken seriously, and so far we trend pretty well along the same lines. "ee" is a little more feminized in the U.S. as well, with women more likely than men to be willing to ee-ify any term they are currently using, whether it's sweetie for sweetheart, teenyweeny cutiewootie, or Dougie for Doug, as I heard a lady call to her friend last weekend.

But calling biker gangs "bikies" abruptly raises a flag that we are no longer on home turf. Either Australian English has divorced itself from the baby connotation of the "ee" sound, or in a country with poisonous radar-using furbearing egg-laying platypuses, stretches of hundreds of miles of nothing between dusty outposts, and giant toads that ooze toxins, methamphetamine-dealing biker gangs merely qualify as "cute." Oddly, the wide-spread use of "ee" forms which would be a feminine tendency in the U.S. becomes a back-to-front way of reinforcing the impression of all the testosterone inherent in Australia.