Kiwi accents: Are they cringe or part of our distinctive culture?

It’s generally thought that the distinctive New Zealand accent first hit its straps in the 1960s, when chef Alison Holst went on television talking about how to cook “fush”. But our Received English vowels had been soaking up the colonial-twang marinade since at least the 1900s. And to read the archives, notably letters and articles in the Listener over many decades, many of us fought our “ixceent” every step of the way. Linguistics professor Elizabeth Gordon has studied New Zealand’s distinctive speech patterns more closely than most and can attest that the great vowel changes were well under way more than a century ago.

Initially, locals and settlers deplored the changes as the influence of Cockney - not generally regarded as quirky and endearing as it is now. But, Gordon says, Cockney was not a particular influence. Clearly, colonial New Zealand was a soup of different incoming accents. But the templates don’t fit neatly. The Scots might perhaps have given us “fush” for fish, the Northern Irish “flayce” for fleece. But where did “ket” for cat or “drees” for dress come from? Gordon says the “eh” sound in trap, cat and tap probably originated with English settlers. But however it happened, it started a vowel-slide. “One moves and the next one has to move to get out of the way.” The dipthongs, the double vowel sounds in words like face, price, choice, goat and mouth, have also been in motion.

A useful sample of the trajectory is recordings of Radio New Zealand’s now-retired rural presenter, Jack Perkins. The 1972 Perkins is a careful speaker; his vowels are strict, his pronunciation more clipped. In 2015, he’s talking to an older woman from Wellington’s wealthier middle classes who remembers as a child the declaration of World War II. She says “glowing” like a UK drama graduate, pronounces white as “white” and spells out every syllable of words, such as “particularly”.

But his diction, three decades on, is looser, his vowels roaming more. Wellington broadcaster Garry Ward, who died in 2009, used to reminisce that when he started with the-then NZ Broadcasting Service, he was instructed to pronounce his name as “Gedd-eh”, and it was years before he was allowed to use his authentic accent. Among the habits he and other broadcasters were encouraged to fight was the perceived over-pronunciation of -y and -ies endings, as “ee” and “ees”.

Cultured British speakers snipped those -y and plural endings ever so crisply so that “babies” became “bay-biz” and lorry was “lor-reh” - not forgetting the slight roll of the R into not quite a D.

Further clues to the origins of our speech and language come from poet and educationalist Arthur Wall (1869-1966), a professor of English who wrote and broadcast on our speech with some authority. He defended in the Listener an apparent tendency for New Zealanders to use the uglier, harsher-sounding synonym for a word when a more euphonious one was available, explaining that as in-comers to a fairly exacting new environment, settlers had to work with what they had.

And what they had bore little resemblance to where they’d come from. The New Zealand and Australian wilderness looked nothing at all like English woodlands, copses and spinnys. The general landscape seemed hard to describe in terms of vales, fens and fells. The stock grazing areas were nothing like British meadows. New words for them made sense: bush, paddock, gully, even creek for what turned out to be parts of magnificent rivers. Wall wrote that Australia’s earlier settlement was highly influential on the subsequent New Zealand lexicon, as initially New Zealand immigrants came through Australia.

In the harsh and challenging environment for settlers on both sides of the Tasman, he wrote, “the pioneers ... Were, of course, rigidly practical in their outlook and their main aims were strictly material, so that anything in the nature of poetry or sentiment was alien to their manner of thought and speech.” Wall also charted our habit of self- deprecation. “... From the early days, the colonists adopted almost as a national idiom the figure of speech called meiosis or litotes, the ironically modest form of speech, [which is] the opposite of boasting. Thus, they still called their horse, however proud they were of it, ‘the moke’ and their dog ‘the mong’.” This ironic modesty became a firm habit. One’s thousand-acre block might be referred to as “the paddock”, and even when surveys found that erstwhile-labelled creeks were tributaries of mighty rivers, creeks they remained.

A general rule is that language change has been around for 30 years before it gets noticed, Gordon says. The noticing was well under way by the time the Listener first went to press. Many comments about the particulars of our language were first recorded in this magazine’s letters pages, a treasure trove for Gordon’s early studies - including two dozen letters in the 1940s disputing the pronunciation of Yarmouth and Marlborough. The Listener was one of the few publications in this country to run a regular language column - by professor of English lan Gordon (no relation) for at least a decade. That “wonderful resource” of language change - and our views about it- now sits in about five ring binders in the Canterbury University linguistics department.