Sydney - The emergency services telephone number in Australia is 000, but with so many programmes from the United States on television and in the cinema, those in distress often try to get through on 911, the US emergency services equivalent.

Mimicry of all things American is a phenomenon that Queensland University linguist Roly Sussex has studied extensively. He sees it in vocabulary items, in intonation, in signage and in spelling.

It's an example, he says, of the "prestige model" in which people knowingly or inadvertently copy what they admire or see as powerful.

"At the moment - and this has been the case for some time now - that's American-English," Professor Sussex said. "They see or hear these things being used by people, in MTV for example, and they think 'gee! I want to be like that.'"

In American-English, the stress on a word is more likely to be at the beginning than at the end. So rugby coaches in Australia now talk of the DE-fence rather than the de-FENCE, as used to be the norm in Strine, or Australian-English.

Sussex gives lots of other examples of the stress on words moving to the left: DIS-tribute, RE-search, CIG-arette and DIS-count.

"Australians seem to be very prone to this," Sussex said. "We're really very insecure."

He noted that the linguistic aspects of what has been called American cultural imperialism were a lot less pronounced in New Zealand. You would expect the opposite, New Zealand being a quarter the size of Australia, and so less able to defend itself from cultural encroachments.

The might of Yankee-talk is wondrous to behold. When a freshly elected Kevin Rudd addressed Australians as prime minister for the first time in November, he prefaced his acceptance speech with: "OK, guys." (dpa)