There's the ancient tradition of Tasmanian Aboriginal languages, sadly decimated by the impact of colonisation, but revived in part due to the efforts of the Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre to create the palawa kani language.

palawa kani is an amalgamation of Indigenous words that have survived through written documents and recordings of Fanny Cochrane Smith singing traditional songs.

And then, of course, there's the post-settlement words and phrases convicts and migrants pilfered from their British forebears.

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In each word is a potted history, a window into bygone eras and faraway places.

In 1988, the Australian National Dictionary Centre (ANDC) was established, with the express task of probing these histories and tracing the genealogy of uniquely Australian words. Jointly funded by the Australian National University and Oxford University Press Australia (OUP), its mission is to research Australian English and consult with OUP to inform the entries in its Australian National Dictionary.

ANDC editor Julia Robinson said Tasmania's relatively large quantity of unique terms partly stemmed from its convict history and remoteness from the rest of Australia.

"It's probably pretty obvious that [Tasmania is] going to have terms that don't necessarily translate to the rest of the country," she said.

Among those terms is 'rum 'un', which, although British in origin, has become a kind of Tasmanian-ism.

'Rum' has been used as an adjective, meaning odd or eccentric. A rum 'un, therefore, denotes an odd or eccentric individual.

"The Brits have been recording that sense as somewhat dated but it's certainly hung on in Tasmania in that form," Ms Robinson said. "That's quite distinctively Tasmanian."

Former ANDC director Bruce Moore has questioned whether the definition of rum 'un leans more towards describing someone who's "a bit of a rascal, a larrikin".

"I am not entirely convinced that we have the range of meanings for this usage entirely right," Dr Moore has previously said.

In the same category of words originating from Britain are 'yaffler' and 'nointer'.

"Yaffler is from a British dialect - yaffle means to bark sharply like a dog or to talk indistinctly, to mumble, or to yelp," Ms Robinson said. "Tasmania's developed [the] meaning: a garrulous person, someone who's long-winded."

"We date [its first recording] from 1887."

Nointer, meanwhile, has its genesis in the term 'anoint'.

"[It's] a variant of the word 'anointer', one who deserves an anointing - that is, a thrashing," Ms Robinson said.

Dr Moore said particular words often caught on in a community when there was a "need" for them at a given time.

"If you want a term for mischievous children, you've got little buggers, and so on," Dr Moore said. "But if a dialect comes along with a single word, like nointer, to describe such a person, which is not two words, and it's not a phrase or something like that then perhaps there is a use for it."

Dr Moore said the examples of yaffler and nointer were interesting due to the fact that words from British dialects tended to spread right across Australia rather than just remaining localised to a particular part of the country.

"If you take a word like 'billy', the cooking implement, which comes from a Scottish dialect, [it was] used right across Australia," he said.

"What's unusual about the Tasmanian examples of yaffler and nointer is that they're both British dialect terms but look as if they've only been used in Tasmania in Australia."

Most of the Australian words originating from British dialects tended to come from Northern English dialects and the Scottish Lowlands, according to Dr Moore.

"Both nointer and yaffler come from Northern English dialects. And I don't think people have done enough work [on it], but it probably means that at some stage in the 19th century, and I would guess, in the 1860s-70s that, as there were big migrations from Northern England, and also from Scotland, that those words must have been brought [to Tasmania] at that stage," he said.

But Dr Moore said Australia was not like New Zealand in that migration to the latter saw people from particular parts of Britain concentrating in certain areas of the country.

"It looks as if in Tasmania, for some reason, at some stage in the 19th century, some of those British dialect words got into Tasmanian speech from the migrants, and it didn't happen on the mainland - so that's quite interesting."

Tasmanians are not averse to bastardising existing phrases, either; mangling them to the point where their original meanings are unrecognisable.

Case in point: 'beastly careless'.

"Everyone else uses [beastly careless] in the way you'd expect it to be used and that is very careless - a very careless chap," Dr Moore said. "Not in the Tasmanian sense [which is], 'I'm beastly careless', or, 'I couldn't give a damn'."

At least one uniquely Tasmanian term was born out of a patriotic desire to ensure the name of a particular variety of cured meat didn't give credit to the enemy during wartime.

The German sausage became known as the Belgian sausage, supposedly due to an article in Launceston's Daily Telegraph in 1914.

"[It said], 'The German sausage: Why not call them Belgian sausages made from Tasmania meat? It would represent pluck and quality'," Dr Moore recounted.

"We all had this story that it changed because of the First World War, as the German tanks rolled into Belgium."

Ms Robinson said a new lexicon of Tassie terms was emerging, prompted in part by the younger generation.

One of these terms is the 'shoey', which is when someone drinks beer out of a shoe.

A New York Times article was recently written about the phenomenon, tracing it back to Tasmanian punk music culture, particularly popular St Helens band Luca Brasi's live shows.

"It's obviously not confined to Tasmania but, so far, our earliest evidence is from Tasmania," Ms Robinson said of the shoey.

"Our first evidence [of the term being used] comes from 2014 and mentions the name of a [Hobart] festival called All Tomorrow's Shoeys.

"We presume since that festival happened in 2014, the reference suggested it was probably going on earlier than that, so it's possible that shoey does have its origins in Tasmania."

Ms Robinson said one of the best means of finding new regionalisms was by reading memoirs.

"A couple of [Tasmanian] memoirs I read recently were [independent Tasmanian senator] Jacqui Lambie's and [author] Rachael Treasure's," she said. "Whenever I hear [Senator Lambie] on the radio or television, my ears prick up and I take notes."

"In [her] memoir, we came across the term 'chirpy'.

"I've done a little bit of a look around about this and it's in the context of, 'We got together to discuss it over a couple of chirpys", which I assume is a drink."

Ms Robinson said she couldn't find a use of the term in the same context elsewhere, but still couldn't be certain that it was uniquely Tasmanian.

Dr Moore warned that some of Tasmania's favourite regionalisms could disappear soon.

"Younger people are getting their words from quite different sources to what they used to," he said. "Rather than family groups and things like that, they're getting it from social media, etc."

"It seems likely that some of these local words will disappear.

"But they do carry history about the area."