Abstract
This chapter explores the meaning and social use of the word bogan in Australian English. Although bogan is arguably a term that is currently trending in use and has been parodied in television series such as Bogan Pride and Upper Middle Bogan, it has so far been examined predominantly by sociologists, media scholars and social commentators (e.g. Nichols in The Bogan delusion. Affirm, Mulgrave, VIC, 2011; Gibson in Journal of Australian Studies 37(1):62–75, 2013; Pini et al. in Sociology 46(1):142–158, 2012), with little to no semantic research to date into bogan as a personal descriptor in colloquial Australian English. This study contributes to filling this gap by providing a foundation based on which the meaning(s) of the term and its current widespread use in social interactions can be understood. In the process, it demonstrates that bogan is more than a term that asserts middle class hegemony, a label it has been repeatedly branded with; rather, it has a strong semantic core to which its meaning across various Australian discourses can be traced back (Rowen in Cultural keywords in discourse. John Benjamins, Amsterdam, pp. 55–82, 2017). I will draw on interactional pragmatics to analyse the interactional achievement of locally situated meanings of bogan in conversational data. I will then provide comment on the role of Natural Semantic Metalanguage in dealing with participants’ interactionally specific meaning(s) of bogan. Data on usage comes from a corpus of naturally occurring examples of use of bogan in social interaction.
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Notes
- 1.
The term social discourse is used to refer to contexts in which people speak about other people in informal social settings, including online.
- 2.
In this chapter the term bogan is understood as a personal identifier noun referring to a person or a group of people and excluding its use as an adjective, for example in expressions like he’s being bogan, bogan attitude etc.
- 3.
A mullet hairstyle is one where the hair is short at the front and sides of the head and long at the back. It was a fashion trend in the 1980s.
- 4.
FIFO is an acronym for ‘fly-in fly-out’ and is used to refer to people who fly to a location to work temporarily and then fly out to return to their permanent place of residence.
- 5.
Slapper is a colloquial term that is often used to refer to people as vulgar and promiscuous. It is usually a referent for females only.
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Appendix—Transcription Key
Appendix—Transcription Key
- (0.5):
-
pause measured by 1/10 of a second
- (.):
-
pause under 0.2 s
- (word):
-
uncertain word
- [:
-
overlap starts
- ]:
-
overlap ends
- =:
-
lines latch onto one another without hearable pause
- < >:
-
slower than the surrounding talk
- > <:
-
faster than the surrounding talk
- -:
-
break-off or stuttering speech
- /:
-
pitch upstep
- \:
-
pitch downstep
- ↓:
-
falling pitch
- ↑:
-
rising pitch
- .:
-
falling final tone
- ?:
-
tone clearly rises towards the end
- £:
-
smiley voice, or suppressed laughter
- ja:
-
emphasized syllable
- JA:
-
louder than the surrounding speech
- °°:
-
sotto voce
- . h:
-
exhalation
- .h:
-
inhalation
- (h):
-
laughter in the conversation/speech
- ::::
-
colons indicate stretched sound.
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Rowen, R. (2020). The “Aussie” Bogan: An Occasioned Semantics Analysis. In: Peeters, B., Mullan, K., Sadow, L. (eds) Studies in Ethnopragmatics, Cultural Semantics, and Intercultural Communication. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-32-9975-7_4
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