I THOUGHT after 18 months here I'd pretty much discovered all the major differences in my native tongue between England and Australia.

Flip flops are thongs, peppers are capsicums and sausages are snags.

Embracing the Aussie spirit, I’ve become an expert at the Tim Tam straw, can just about understand AFL and I often struggle over who I find more annoying between Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott.

I’ve also flown the flag on January 26, and - as mentioned in a previous column - I try to avoid the British trait of greeting people by asking if they’re ‘all right?’.

Hell, a few times I’ve even put on an Aussie accent so well I've convinced people both here and abroad that I’m a true blue Australian.

So it was a genuine shock to me over the weekend that I found there was still a word which I had no idea was pronounced differently here.

I was at the heavily fashion conscious Laneway Festival, when a group of friends asked how to spell ‘ma-roan’.

It was only the fact that every third person there seemed to be wearing the colour maroon that I knew what they were on about.

I could not believe how they were pronouncing it, and thought maybe it was a trendy alternative way to say the colour that I had unfashionably missed out on.

But no, according to them I - and the rest of the English speaking world - are wrong. And when I tried to correct them, my West Australian friends shocked me further by saying people only ever use the pronunciation maroon - that rhymes with hoon - because of the American band Maroon 5.

Now for me, whether it’s talking about crappy overrated bands or the shade of reddy-brown - that for two years of my childhood was the colour of my school uniform and seems now to be the trendiest colour for shorts - the word maroon has always been pronounced as it is spelt.

The real surprise, however, was how I went 18 months without hearing this word being used and with no knowledge of it being different anywhere in the world. And I just could not understand how any other possible pronunciation could come from it.

Following a quick search on Google I’m glad to know that I’m not alone in this confusion, as many Australians also hold differing opinions over its use. In particular over east during the NRL State of Origin games.

There is also debate about the beginnings of the word and its pronunciation, with online forums talking about the evolution of the French word ‘marron’ into modern English.

Of course none of this really matters and no pronunciation is any better than the other. There are plenty of ridiculously spelt English words that are not spoken as they are written, and others that just sound different in other parts of the UK through our mental variety of accents.

Try going to the north of England and asking someone to say ‘cook book’ and you’ll see what I mean.

Also back in England, my own - somewhat Americanised - forename is so rare in parts of the country that I regularly have to correct people who irritatingly pronounce it wrong. Not a problem I have here.

It’s probably this irritation over my own name’s incorrect pronunciation that gets me so worked up and eager to find and use the right way to say words wherever I go.

But while I continue to adapt to life in Perth I may stick to my original pronunciation of maroon. So it still rhymes with cartoon, moon and er... maroon.

It’s not because I have any problem with adapting to say ‘maroan’ when in the appropriate company.

It’s just after 18 months, no matter how much I try I still can’t call lose the English pronunciation of yoghurt, where the first syllable rhymes with jog.

And until I do, all other differences in pronunciation I discover in WA can just wait awhile.

* Corey is an English journalist adapting to life in Australia. Follow @MrCorey on Twitter.