South Australia Culture & Language

South Australia is quieter and more ordered than the eastern states, and rather likes it that way. Adelaide's planned grid inside a ring of parkland shapes the city's whole rhythm.

Festival culture is disproportionate to the population: the Adelaide Festival and Fringe together make February and March one of the larger arts seasons in the southern hemisphere, and the Fringe is among the biggest of its kind anywhere.

The German-Lutheran inheritance in the Barossa and the Adelaide Hills is genuine rather than themed — Lutheran churches, bakeries, mettwurst and surnames, three or four generations deep.

Wine is not a niche interest here. It is an ordinary subject of conversation, and the regions are close enough that most people have opinions about all of them.

English is universal. Italian, Greek, Mandarin and Vietnamese are all widely spoken in Adelaide.

Kaurna, the language of the Adelaide plains, is being actively revived and now appears in dual place names across the city; Adnyamathanha is spoken in the Flinders, where Ikara is the proper name for Wilpena Pound.

Local usage worth knowing: fritz is the luncheon meat everywhere else calls devon or polony, a frog cake is exactly what it sounds like, and the Bay means Glenelg. Adelaide residents will ask which school you went to, and they mean it as geography rather than class.