The New Zealand accent explained

Monday, 24 May 2021

New Zealanders are known for their different vowels, but some young Aucklanders are dropping them, a study shows.

A lot of Irish people can’t really pronounce the ‘th’ sound. It becomes ‘t’ or ‘d’. This means ‘three’ becomes ‘tree’ and ‘this’ becomes ‘dis’.

Most of the time this doesn’t really matter. A sentence’s context typically relieves any confusion.

It becomes a real pain when your name ends with a ‘th’ sound.

“Hi, I’m Keith,” I say. “Did you say Keet or Ketch?” New Zealanders respond.

* Working out where the next big earthquake will come from

* Simon Bridges should be proud of his accent

Accents eh? We all have one. In linguistic terms they are defined as how people speak their language. They develop when a group of people, who all speak the same language, are isolated.

Here’s a fascinating real-life example. A throng of people with different accents spend winter together in a very isolated part of the world: Antarctica. Researchers decided to track just how their speech changed during the winter.

There appeared to be some convergence in how those people spoke during those lonely winter months. Three of their vowels began to sound more similar, and they even showed signs of developing, as a group, a new way of pronouncing the vowel in words like ‘’go’’ and ‘’code’’ and ’’sew’’. What happened may have been the birthing of a new accent.

So how did the New Zealand accent form? Why aren’t there dramatic regional differences? And what does the future hold for the way we speak?

First question: Can I change my accent?

The foundations of an accent appear to be laid down very early. For example, when infants say their first word they mimic the speech they’ve been exposed to.

That doesn’t necessarily mean a person will speak with the same twang forever. Linguists used to think that accents were set in stone by the time someone hits puberty, but the reality is more complicated.

While it’s true that it’s easier for children to change their accent, there are no hard and fast rules.

People can consciously try to change their accents. Or, more likely, a person’s accent shifts and softens depending on where they are, in an attempt to subconsciously assimilate into a new social group. Crazy eh?

“You need to be careful about being absolute. But the general rule is that children really want to fit in,” says Elizabeth Gordon, a now-retired linguistic professor.

A strange condition exists called Foreign Accent Syndrome, which causes injured people to speak differently.

There’s a particularly unfortunate story of a Norwegian woman who sustained head injuries during World War II. According to the media organisation NPR, she developed a German accent and was shunned as a result.

Why do New Zealanders sound like, um, New Zealanders?

Around 1900, people began to notice a new variant of English emerging in Aotearoa.

This appears to have repulsed many early settlers who believed in the purity of the Queen’s English.

An 1897 Bay of Plenty Times column branded the accent a loathsome disease. “One writer says that he heard a class of school children repeating the eight line of the multiplication table, which they did in this fashion: ‘Ight tens are ighty. Ight elevens are ighty ight!’”

It was dubbed a dreadful “colonial twang” – a twang that would go on to appear in TV commercials, John Oliver skits and even be branded the sexiest in the world (in a poll with, if we’re honest, questionable scientific rigour).

In the book New Zealand English, linguists Jennifer Hay, Margaret Maclagan and Gordon tell a story of a Wellington school principal being questioned by the Educational Commission in 1912.

“I think it is getting worse and worse every year. If you take a class of thirty at the beginning of the year I do not think you will find more than three or four who will say ‘house’ correctly,” the principal says.

The fact people were saying ‘’foive’’ rather than ‘‘five’, ‘’teown’’ rather than ‘’town’’ induced particular anger.

The book notes: “These pronunciations were described as ‘faulty’, ‘impure’, ‘slovenly’; some comments were even more extreme, using the adjectives ‘evil-sounding’, ‘wretched’ and ‘degenerate’.”

Kiwi duo discover secret to getting smart speakers to understand Kiwi accents. (Video first published in February 2019)

While it appears outrage at the accent reached critical mass around the turn of the 20th century, New Zealand English was brewing even earlier.

It turns out that in the early 1940s, a bunch of traveller broadcasters travelled by van from town to town getting elderly people to speak on tape.

What they found showed the twang was fermenting long before the moaning started.

They spoke to Mr Malcom Ritchie. He was born in Dunedin in 1866 and his parents were from Scotland. But Malcolm spoke mostly like a south-western Englishman, the linguists explain, with elements of Scottish, Irish and Cornish.

They spoke to Annie Hamilton. She was born in Arrowtown in 1877. Her parents were Irish. Her accent sounded a lot like New Zealanders sound today.

So what happened? Well, according to census data from 1871, about half the early settlers were English, about a quarter were Irish, about a quarter were Scots and 5 per cent were Australian. And of course Māori were present.

Around 1890, changes in the educational system meant the number of children attending school skyrocketed. These schools appear to have been the perfect stewing pot for an amalgamation of accents.

The Kiwi accent was on full display in the famous Ghost Chips ad.

Kids began to speak like each other, not their parents.

They appear to have created New Zealand English in an extraordinarily short time frame.

The new accent appears to have appeared first in towns with more diverse populations, with some places holding on to distinctive accents (where everyone was Scottish, for example) a little longer.

Are there different accents across New Zealand?

“Auckland is often identified as having abrupt, fast speech, the Far North and the east coast of the North Island are often identified as showing Māori influences.

“Taranaki may be identified as sounding rural, Christchurch and Canterbury are usually identified as sounding more English and the West Coast of the South Island as slow, sloppy and/or laid back.”

This is how New Zealand English outlines two studies on regional accents.

There’s a fishhook though. In this study, a few people described Nelson/Marlborough as having a “summer” accent. This illustrates a problem, the authors wrote. People know regions have unique characteristics, so they assume they have unique speech.

New Zealanders very much believe that they can tell where someone is from by the way they talk. But there is no hard evidence of regional accents.

Why? Well, in Ireland, the people in the town of Cork speak in an entirely different (and baffling way) to the people an hour up the road in Limerick.

For centuries, Cork and Limerick would have once been relatively isolated allowing distinctive ways of speaking to develop.

In New Zealand, the regions have only spoken English for a relatively short period of time and those regions have not been really isolated from each other in the way English or Irish towns once were.

Of course, different words are used in different parts of New Zealand. Some people call them woodlice, some call them slaters. Some people live in baches, others live in cribs.

Che Baker teaches Stuff staff how to speak like a Southlander. This video was first published in 2017.

That isn’t enough to state with certainty that there are different dialects or accents.

These two phrases – accent and dialect – are often used interchangeably by the way. Generally speaking, an accent describes how words are pronounced. A dialect is more than that: it is pronunciations, vocabulary and grammar.

Linguistic Professor Miriam Meyerhoff has a different take on this. It may be that the reason for the lack of evidence of regional accents is down to how linguists work.

When people are being interviewed as part of a research project, they don’t talk the way they usually do.

“Wainuiomata are said to have used ‘did you got’ instead of ‘have you got’ but try getting that in conversational speech,” she says.

And there’s another thing, she says. “So much of the data on New Zealand English has been collected from Christchurch and Wellington, or pre-supposed hot spots like Southland.”

There hasn’t been much done in the regions, where New Zealanders do believe people speak differently.

They definitely speak differently in Southland, don’t they?

Find a Southlander and ask them to say ‘’The nurse wore a dirty purple work shirt’’ after promising you won’t make fun. You’ll likely hear some Rs, but it turns out Southlanders only roll their Rs for some words.

They typically roll their Rs when the R sound appears after a vowel. This is called a postvocalic R. They won’t roll their Rs in phrases like ‘’Ruby has a Red Robe’’’.

Linguists call people who roll their Rs rhotic. Irish, Americans and Scots are rhotic. Kiwis generally are not.

Linguist and University of Canterbury senior lecturer Dr Lynn Clark recently completed a study of the Southland accent.

Through studying archival audio recordings, she found women generally use a more R sound in words like ‘’nurse’’. Men used to roll their Rs in every word but have slowly changed, seemingly following the women's lead.

Is there a Māori English?

There is. This is a descriptive used by linguists to describe a version of English, spoken primarily by, but not limited to, Māori.

Of course, it’s not massively different to other New Zealand accents, but there appear to be subtle changes in how vowels are pronounced. For example, Te Ara states the ‘oo’ in words like ‘’goose’’ sound more like the ‘u’ in the French word ‘’tu’’. Other features include a different rhythm.

New Zealand English also notes a fascinating stereotype from the first half of the 20th century: Māori spoke more cultured English than many Pākehā.

“One correspondent to the NZ Listener,” it states, asked why Māori speak much better and much more “melodious English than their pakeha countrymen?’”.

Another wrote: “Only by the practice of the Māoris vowel sounds can we be saved from the twang which is fast becoming characteristic of New Zealand speech.”

What’s the long term prognosis for the accent?

There has been recent reporting suggesting that the Southland accent is spreading. But, Clark says, while rhoticity (or the R sound) is turning up elsewhere in New Zealand, the Southland variant is not taking over.

“In Auckland in particular the R sound is showing up in much more diverse populations, where people may not necessarily speak English as their first language.”

These individuals may well be learning American English – which doesn’t mean they’ll speak with an American accent – but they will pronounce Rs.

Variations happen. For example, in London, Multicultural London English, a new dialect, emerged as the city diversified.

Meyerhoff has been actively researching how people speak throughout Auckland to see if areas with heavy migration are developing new ways of speaking.

The work suggests that changes are emerging in how people talk. And interestingly, those changes may not be limited just to more diverse suburbs.

For example, younger Pākehā in Titirangi are speaking in a slightly different way. Why is a bit of a mystery.

“The usual thinking is that you need face-to-face, high-quality contact for changes to spread. Traditional media don’t offer that. But new media (for example, TikTok) may offer high quality (if not face to face) contact. So I used to dismiss media as a source of change. Now I am reserving judgment.”

There’s also work going on now to see whether those changes in Auckland are spreading further.

Is it that what we’re seeing in Auckland is just how all “young Kiwis speak?”, Meyerhoff asks.

As for New Zealand as a whole, it’s hard to know. Over time more regional dialects could develop. This is the normal trajectory of language change and typically takes decades.

New Zealand English is very new. It may be that the fact people are constantly exposed to diversity through the ease of travel or media may dampen change. Or it may accelerate it.

What do we think of our accent?

A few studies have gauged what New Zealanders make of the way they speak.

One in the 1990s found that those speaking the accent were not perceived as self-confident, intelligent, or having a sense of humour. Ouch.

Another study from the late 1990s had private-school girls and private-school boys listen to a young woman with a strong New Zealand accent.

The book notes: “She was said to have low intelligence, low family income, and be most likely to smoke and sleep around. When asked for a possible future occupation for this girl, the most frequent responses given were ‘unemployed’, ‘single parent’ or ‘prostitute’.”

In a 2013 Stuff Nation piece, Lindsay Perigo, a former newsreader, attacked New Zealand broadcasters, writing: “No, one is not demanding they speak like the Queen, but is it too much to ask that they sound like educated adults?”

In a blog in reply, the UC Linguistics Department makes this point: “The Kiwi accent, or any other accent, is not a simple and straight-forward indication of a speaker’s intelligence or level of education.”

They write that there isn’t a gold standard of English. People speak in different ways and that’s totally fine.