Using slang words ending in ‘ie’ or ‘o’, such as truckie and ambo, makes you more likeable to your fellow Australians, a study has found.

Dr Evan Kidd said the team of Australian National University researchers were interested in the social effects of particular kinds of slang where people shorten words to end in the ‘ie’ or ‘o’ sound.

“These terms are ironically called hypocoristics which is a very long name for a very short words,” he said.

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“These are words like ‘truckie’ for truck driver, ‘uggies’ for ugg boots, ‘ambo’ for ambulance drivers and things like that.”

The study was undertaken with an actor who spoke to participants using either shortened or unshortened Australian terms, who were then asked to rate the actor’s likeability.

“What we found is that when the actor used the slang words, the participant likes them more after the experiment finished than if they didn’t use them,” Dr Kidd said.

As well as showing that people who use slang are more liked by Australians, the research also found that any accent was equally important in influencing results.

Study considers effects of race, gender

Dr Kidd said they used actors of different genders and races in the study to see if it had any effect on the results.

“Initially we used what you might think of as prototypical Australian, so white Caucasian Australians and we wanted to see if there was an effect of gender on that,” he said.

“We found that [gender] didn’t have any effect, we still found this likeability effect in general.

“Then what we did was [get] a person of Asian background who spoke with an Australian accent, but also in another condition pretended to have a different accent.

“What we found was that when she spoke with an Australian accent we found the same likeability effect for her, but we didn’t find it when she spoke in a foreign accent.”

Dr Kidd said having an Australian accent was key to being liked because it identified people as a member of the national culture.

“If you’re an obvious member of Australian culture because of your accent then using these slang terms increases your likeability,” he said.

“If you don’t speak with an Australian accent it doesn’t decrease it at all, it just doesn’t have an effect.”

-ABC