“Naur” is everywhere, but a recent tweet claimed it had reached a particularly notable echelon of ubiquity. “Gen Z will not like hearing me say this…but ‘naurrrr’ and ‘saurrr good’ is just the new ‘ermahgerd,”’ it said, referring to the 2012 internet meme.
Sure, there are definite similarities. Both “r,” with “ermahgerd” stretching your mouth horizontally and “naur” stretching it vertically. And in the same way you can “speak” in ermahgerd (“Twitter is a hellhole,” would be “Twerter is a herrhoe” for example), you can speak in “naur”… it’s called speaking with an Australian accent.
Online, Americans have come up with new spellings of words to indicate they’re being said in the accent, changing a phrase like “koalas are so cute” to “koalarrs ah saurr cute.”
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But while ermahgerd was born out of the joyous early internet as a way to express nerdy excitement, “naur” has much more complicated roots and uses. We break them down below with the help of Australian voice and dialect coach Amy Hume, who teaches Voice at the Victorian College of the Arts at the University of Melbourne.
What does “naur” mean and how do you use it?
“Naur” is “no” spelled in an Australian accent. More accurately, it’s “no” spelled in what an Australian accent sounds like to Americans. “When you tell an Australian that there’s an ‘r’ in the way we pronounce ‘no’ they’re like ‘Mmm… no, there’s not,'” says Hume.
That’s because the Australian accent is non-rhotic, so an “r” isn’t pronounced unless it comes before a vowel. The American accent is rhotic, so when a word is spelt with an “r,” a “hard r” sound is used. When Americans apply their pronunciation to the Australian “no,” it results in the phonetic spelling of “naur.” (To an Australian, “naur” looks like it would be pronounced “naw.”)
“Naur” has varied and flexible use that changes with capitalization and a, u, and r additions.
It can be a softer, more playful “no”:
Sam: My day was going so well, but I just spilled hot tea all over myself on the subway 🙁
Alex: Omg naurrr
It can be used in place of “wait” or “hold on”:
@Sam on Twitter: naur because zendaya and tom holland are so cute
“Naur” exists because “no,” “nope,” and “nah” no longer cut it. In just the past four years, we’ve witnessed the breakdown of American politics, global warming disasters, and the COVID-19 pandemic. There are only so many times you can express fear or disapproval with “no” before it loses its meaning. In a post-no society, “naur” is the next iteration of that feeling.
Sam: So there’s a new COVID-19 variant, and it’s spreading super quickly in large cities.
Alex: Naur
Sam: I also just heard they’re making a fourth ‘Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them’ movie
Alex: Naur
Sam: And J.K. Rowling is directing
Alex: NAAAURRRR
Like “no,” “naur” has an almost infinite number of meanings when spoken aloud. It can be chewed through quickly or pulled out into a drawl, expanding to include up to four vowels and three consonants in a single syllable, depending on the pronunciation. The meaning of “Naur” shifts with context, which means it can mean anything you want it to.
How do you pronounce “naur?”
Hume says that, to learn an accent, you’ve got to master that accent’s “oral posture” — the setting of muscles as they’ve toned to an accent.”
“A typical Australian speaker’s setting is likely to be kind of pursed lip corners and the lips don’t really move that much,” she says, “There’s not that much activity in the cheeks either, and the tongue is pretty low in the mouth. In a general American setting, there’s a little bit more lift in the cheeks, more movement in the top lip, and the tongue sits higher in the mouth.”
To pronounce “naur,” Hume says take it easy. “Your tongue has to relax, lowering back. Imagine putting your tongue on like a deck chair beside a really nice pool. Your tongue is just so chill-axed. And then you have to sort of close your lips. [In Australia] we say ‘don’t let the flies in.'” The Australian pronunciation of the end of “no” ends in a sound more akin to a “w” than an “r,” like “na-oooo-wuh.”
All that muscularity make it much harder for Americans to adopt convincing Australian accents than for Australians to do an American one, says Hume. “The Australian tongue is so relaxed that once you start exercising it, you can lift it and [achieve] various American accents. Whereas for Americans, it’s harder to drop the tongue.” Just last week, Aussie actor Felix Mallard of Netflix’s Ginny and Georgia addressed his approach to switching between his native and American accent, including tongue placement and difficulty of hitting the “r” in every word just right.
Plus, Aussie mimicry skills maybe be sharper because of life-long exposure to American culture. In Australia, “you can’t go an hour without hearing some sort of American accent because of a TV show or some ad online or whatever,” explains Hume, “whereas as an American can pinpoint those key events [when they’ve] heard Australian accents.”
Not quite mastering it? Don’t worry, it takes some time to get used to a whole new sound, says Hume, “and you’re creating a whole new neural pathway to make that sound.”
Where did “naur” come from?
Though Know Your Meme pegs 2021 as the beginning of the “naur” revolution, it likely started earlier, around 2018. In September of that year, a tweet reading “Australians be like…..naur” gained more than 17,000 likes.
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That same year, the global growth in K-pop coincided with the debut of Australian idols in major groups, most notably Bang Chan and Felix of Stray Kids and later Jake of ENHYPEN, who joined Blackpink’s Rosé as part of the industry’s “Aussie line.” Fan-made YouTube compilations of the line’s English-speaking moments interviews and live streams have garnered millions of views, but Bang Chan and Felix’s have proved to be their country’s most vocal evangelists. They regularly exchange “g’day mates,” extol the virtues of Vegemite, and revel in their unique pronunciation.
When fans edited videos of “Aussie line” moments, they spelled out each syllable on screen as the idol as they heard the idol pronounce it, elongating “nice” to “noice,” for example, and “no” to “naur.” Fans began using “naur” on stan Twitter.
In 2019, clips from the Australian television show H2O: Just Add Water featuring the characters saying “Cleo, no!” in rich Australian accents grew popular on TikTok, as did imitations of those lines.
A quick Google search shows the phrase really taking off in May 2021, when mainstream Twitter got ahold of it and users imagined phrases in which “no” was replaced by “naur” and other Aussie-fied words like “saur” (for “so”). It’s become so prevalent that brands have jumped into the fray, with Netflix posting a TikTok ranking of the best “naurs” from H2O: Just Add Water in November 2022.
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Why do we like saying “naur?”
Hume knows how much non-Aussies love to imitate Aussie accents. “I have a lot of American friends and whenever I say ‘no,’ they repeat it. So it’s a sound that has always stood out to their ears. As human beings, we’re wired to connect [and mimicry] is almost instinctive.”
It’s also a way of processing the world around us. That’s why kids across the U.S. have picked up Peppa Pig’s British accent and talk about eating “brekky” after watching Australian children’s cartoon Bluey on Disney Plus.
Mimicking an accent is also a huge factor in fitting in, especially for children. “If someone moves [to another] country while they’re a child, it’s pretty likely that their accent would change [unconsciously]. Linguistic research shows that after the age of 11, it’s more of a conscious choice.”
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Of course, “naur” also just feels good to say.
“There are oral postures that we can take on for fun,” Hume says. For example, “ermahgerd.” When you say it out loud, she explains, “you’re pulling your lips sideways a little bit, holding your tongue in a certain position, and making a face. It feels like a live action emoji, really, doesn’t it? It’s like ‘I’ve got a face and I got words to put to it. So it does feel quite satisfying” and naur, in all of its many forms, is just as delicious.
What do Australians think of “naur?”
A friend who recently travelled to Canada and Cincinnati told Hume how prevalent “naur” has become, and she says she’s done about 20 radio interviews in the past four weeks about the global interest in the word. “What’s become apparent to me is how little Australians know about how we speak,” Hume says, noting that the most common reaction to the “naur” phenomenon is “tell us more about our accent!” [Editor’s note: Can confirm. I don’t know what’s funnier or more fascinating: watching Americans nail our accent perfectly, or watching them attempt it and hearing an absolute dog’s brekky of mangled Cockney vowels come tumbling out. The latter is like a child drawing a picture of their family — it’s funny because they’re bad at it, it’s nice because it’s affectionate, and it can also be mortifying because of what features they choose to emphasize. — Caitlin Welsh, Australia Editor]
Overall, Hume says, “There’s an overwhelming group consciousness that’s coming to the pronunciation of the word.” Australian entertainers have adopted a standardized Australian accent in the same way that American celebrities and newscasters adopted the transatlantic accent in the first half of the 20th century. That has led to some shame.
“We’ve got this thing in Australia called the cultural cringe; we cringe at how we sound or how we look,” Hume explains. “There’s discomfort with our own culture which, to me, goes back to colonization. It’s about aspirations to Britain… If I go to the theater, or I see an Australian film, and people are speaking [in a standardized Australian accent], then I cringe at myself because I don’t speak like that.”
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And Hume says it’s still normal for Australian actors to be asked to get rid of their accents entirely. “There’s an expectation that if [an American production is] filming [in Australia], you have to go in to the audition sounding American, so I do a lot of work coaching Australian actors in American accents.”
But the vowel-laden, non-standardized “no” has never truly gone away. “Australians have been talking like that since the country was colonized. It’s been there for 200 years,” says Hume. Now it’s thriving because TikTok has given a platform to everyday people, unaffected by standardization. “Someone from some remote part of Australia records their voice, and they haven’t had any kind of manipulation of their accent.” Take H2O: Just Add Water, an origin point of the “naur” meme: “That was a kids’ TV show where you had young people who hadn’t been to drama school, so their natural voices are on screen. It’s a suburban show, and it was just put on locally.”
After watching the recent rise of “naur,” Hume has changed the topic of her master’s research to focus to how the Australian accent has been portrayed on stage. “My hypothesis is that the standardization of accents has been a contributing factor to why [Australians] don’t know about their accent,” she says. “Naur” may be a phenomenon in the U.S. and online, but its biggest impact could be on Australians themselves. “Your accent is a part of your identity,” says Hume, and gnawing on “naur” can help Aussies learn more about their own.
