Australians have been using slang ever since English-speaking Europeans settled there in the late eighteenth century. Command of slang signified that a person was no stranger, and it continued to be popular throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In recent years, however, some Aussies have grown concerned that their slang might be dying out, and in 2017 they launched a campaign to encourage people to rekindle their use of some seventy words and phrases considered to be uniquely Australian. They believed that the younger generations were overenamoured with US pop culture and were adopting its slang instead. Laying the blame for any lexical decline on American influence, however, is not new. Ever since American talking pictures began to be imported in the 1920s, Australians have worried about new slang infiltrating their language. In fact, some Aussie slang may actually have its origins in American English. As US gold-diggers came to Australia in the mid-nineteenth century, they introduced many informal words and phrases that were gradually incorporated into Australian slang. Moreover, even if some individual words are being used less frequently by locals, many Australian slang terms have become internationally popular. `Selfie', for example, started out as an Aussie term, but now it is truly part of the vocabulary of global English.