This means going back to when large numbers of English-speaking settlers arrived in Aotearoa New Zealand from the mid-19th century. Because they came from different parts of Britain \u2013 largely the south of England, Scotland and Ireland \u2013 they didn\u2019t all speak the same kind of English and brought their regional accents with them.<\/p>\n
Despite the protests of educational authorities and elocution teachers of the time, what followed wasn\u2019t the adoption of a single \u201ccorrect\u201d way of speaking the \u201cQueen\u2019s English\u201d.<\/p>\n
Instead, these various accents came into contact, mixed together and gradually levelled out to something new \u2013 not quite British, not quite anything else. New Zealand linguists have known this part of the story for a while. What we don\u2019t know are some of the specifics.<\/p>\n
Why, for example, does our accent have relatively little regional variation (other than Southlanders and their rolled Rs), despite many early centres such as Christchurch and Dunedin having distinct cultural identities?<\/p>\n
We also don\u2019t know if the accent developed fastest in certain places. Often, accents change quickly in cities and then spread. But so far, most of our historical research comes from recordings of speakers born in small towns.<\/p>\n
A rediscovered theory<\/p>\n
This is where a piece of information that was almost lost provided some surprising inspiration.<\/p>\n
In 1921, a professor at Otago University, George Edward Thompson, completed a thesis on the emerging New Zealand accent. This work was only rediscovered in the Hocken Collections by one of our team members in 2022.<\/p>\n
Thompson\u2019s work provides one of the earliest and most comprehensive first-hand descriptions of how early New Zealanders spoke. One of the things that stood out was a suggestion the accent was developing most strongly in the North Island, particularly in Auckland.<\/p>\n
This got us thinking, because Auckland\u2019s history looks quite different to many of New Zealand\u2019s early districts.<\/p>\n
For one, the city has always been comparatively cosmopolitan, with people arriving from all over Britain, rather than one dominant region. Secondly, its population grew steadily over time, unlike many other districts which saw booms and stagnation. Both these factors make a good environment for an accent to develop.<\/p>\n
We still need to do the proper technical analysis to test whether Thompson was right, which is where the Auckland Libraries recordings are useful. They come from Aucklanders who would have been teenagers and young adults around the time Thompson was writing.<\/p>\n
When you listen to these recordings, the voices sound familiar \u2013 recognisably New Zealand but not quite how we speak today. Sometimes, there\u2019s a slight British or Australian quality and speakers often shift between pronunciations.<\/p>\n
But the features of the New Zealand accent we know are all there \u2013 maybe more than we expected.<\/p>\n
Auckland English<\/p>\n
If our hunch is correct, we may not only solve some mysteries about the accent, but also challenge ideas about how it was formed and who contributed.<\/p>\n
For example, past research has often treated similarities between the Australian and New Zealand accents as coincidental, and assumed M\u0101ori had little influence on vowel pronunciation. This was largely because the research focused on the South Island, where contact with M\u0101ori and Australia was more limited.<\/p>\n
But that\u2019s not necessarily true for Auckland, which had close trade connections with both Australia and local M\u0101ori from its inception. If Auckland was integral to the formation of our accent, those influences may need to be reconsidered.<\/p>\n
Like all accents, New Zealand English continues to evolve and Auckland is at the forefront of changes to the modern accent. Young Aucklanders are keeping their iconic \u201cfush and chups\u201d vowels, but may have an easier time buying \u201cseven eggs\u201d as they aim to be better understood in an increasingly linguistically diverse city.<\/p>\n
Combined with Thompson\u2019s historical commentary, this raises a big question: how long has Auckland been shaping the way New Zealanders sound? If Thompson was right, it might have been longer than we thought.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"This means going back to when large numbers of English-speaking settlers arrived in Aotearoa New Zealand from the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":443357,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[47791,8831,51,226409,11220,151884,9639,5593,226408,6276,194,226407,111,43,139,69,1118,9716,3236,13491,226410,28029,10536,5815,12633,76103,1361,223,32333,4468,36672,2044,120441,6736,14036,377,6438,4512,35111],"class_list":["post-443356","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-zealand","tag-accent","tag-an","tag-auckland","tag-chups","tag-comment","tag-cradle","tag-flat","tag-funny","tag-fush","tag-gets","tag-kiwi","tag-new-hearing","tag-new-zealand","tag-news","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-of","tag-old","tag-overseas","tag-probably","tag-pronounce","tag-rest","tag-someone","tag-speak","tag-spent","tag-swallowed","tag-that","tag-the","tag-theory","tag-thing","tag-thinks","tag-time","tag-vowels","tag-was","tag-whole","tag-world","tag-youre","tag-youve","tag-zealander"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/443356","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=443356"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/443356\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/443357"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=443356"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=443356"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=443356"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}