Why do New Zealanders say 'eh' so much?

Saturday, 29 June 2019

This simple expression is a big cultural export, featuring frequently in our movies, memes, and shows.

It's as much an essential part of the New Zealand vocabulary as 'choice', 'she'll be right', and 'yeah, nah', but the off-hand, often subconscious 'eh' has always been something of a mystery.

'Eh' is what's known as a particle. It's hardly even a word, it's basically just a noise that we plonk at the end of a sentence. It can mean anything from 'I don't care' to 'can you repeat that?' to 'do you agree?', all depending on pitch and tone.

There's not even a lot of agreement about how to spell it (We're going with 'eh', but ay, aye, ae and ey are all equally valid, wrong answers).

Martin Schweinberger, a German academic in English linguistics, based in Australia, recently completed the most extensive study yet on how New Zealanders use 'eh', analysing the conversations of over 1000 New Zealand English speakers and a total of 650,000 words.

* Women shouldn't swear? That's f….. ridiculous, say Kiwi comedians and linguists**

The first thing he found is that New Zealanders say 'eh' a lot. Much more, in fact, than the most famous users of 'eh' - the Canadians. 'Eh' was so uncommon in normal Canadian speech that Schweinberger wasn't able to get a sample size large enough to analyse it properly, which is why he turned to Kiwis, who used it 'substantially more'.

Schweinberger found that 'eh' was used more frequently by younger speakers than older, more by men than women, and more by middle class people than working class.

But by far the biggest difference was how much more Māori use 'eh' than Pakeha. Māori used almost twice the number of 'ehs', and that held true across all age, gender, and class categories.

Miriam Meyerhoff, a professor of linguistics at Victoria University, said the word 'eh' is a 'validation checker'.

Victoria University of Wellington Professor of Linguistics Miriam Meyerhoff.

It used to establish common ground in conversation, to create more of a connection between speakers.

She said there were two main ways 'eh' could be used.

It can be used as a literal question that the other person is being asked to answer, like 'It's bloody hot today, eh?' or 'You went to school in Christchurch, eh?'. In that instance, the speaker is looking for a verbal confirmation from the other person.

Or, it can be a subtle check to make sure the other person is following along with new information which has been introduced, like 'He was way bigger than me, eh', or 'I was pretty tired, eh, but I still had another hour of work'. In that instance, there's no need for the listener to say anything.

'When you ask one of these questions like 'eh', or 'isn't it' or 'you know' there's two possibilities. You could actually be looking for the other person to take over the floor and start talking, or you could just be asking as a way of saying 'are you with me?' she said.

'It is often a way of checking that what has been introduced into the conversation so far is now common ground for both of us. It's sort of checking on whether that relationship and knowledge base has been built up successfully.'

Martin Schweinberger, a German academic who recently completed the most extensive study to date of the New Zealand 'eh'.

She analysed the conversations of 75 Porirua residents to determine how often people verbally responded to 'eh', and what she found suggested that Kiwis don't all see eye to eye on 'eh'.

In the vast majority of instances, Pakeha speakers got no verbal response to 'eh', not even a 'yeah' or 'uh-huh'. But for Māori, it was almost 50/50 whether they would get a response.

The use of the 'eh' wasn't markedly different. It wasn't that Māori were asking more explicit questions. But Māori respond when Pakeha don't.

'That suggests that you've got a Māori norm for using 'eh' and a Pakeha norm for using 'eh', but they're not actually exactly the same thing. There's no New Zealand English norm,' she said.

Meyerhoff suggested that the purpose of 'eh' as a method of creating a connection between two people is essentially stronger and better understood by Māori than Pakeha.

As for the questions of where 'eh' come from and how did it become so popular in New Zealand, sociolinguists actually have a pretty good idea on that front: The te reo word 'nē', often used as part of the phrase 'nē ra'.

It's easy to see the similarity.

For one, it rhymes.

Secondly, it has almost the exact same function. 'Nē' sits at the end of sentences, and the Māori dictionary lists its meaning as 'is that so? won't you? won't we? isn't it?'

''Eh' sounds similar to nē, it has a similar vowel sound, and it tends to be used in similar places, and it seems to be about keeping the conversation moving. It seems pretty plausible that one of the reasons 'eh' is popular in Māori English is because it happens to look a lot like something else that's already in Māori,' Meyerhoff said.

When English settlers arrived, they brought 'eh' with them, which by pure coincidence was an almost identical word. The Oxford English dictionary tracks 'eh' to the 16th Century.

It wasn't necessarily used in quite the same way or with quite the same frequency, but Te Reo speakers learning English for the first time would have picked up on the similarities and simply started using 'eh' in the same way as 'nē'.

'When languages come into contact, the things that are more likely survive are things that are compatible with multiple interpretations. So in this case it sounds like nē, it looks like nē, and so you treat it as if it is nē, and it ends up emerging into English,' she said.

Both Schweinberger and Meyerhoff's studies used recordings of conversations which took place in the 1990s, and they accept speech trends may have changed somewhat since then.