New Zealand: Language (English)

[rsc]

jwg is doing the "travelogue" postings -- he's the one with the pictures -- so I've been thinking up a short series about things that felt "different" -- language, customs, signage -- and/or entertaining.

This first one talks a bit about English as it is spoken in NZ, as perceived by someone from the Northeastern US.


The main distinguishing characteristic of NZ speech, to my ear, is that certain vowels get "pinched" -- I think this may be, technically, a matter of more forward tongue placement -- so that, for instance, [æ]¹ comes out sounding rather like my [E], whereas the NZ equivalent of [E] sounds rather like [I], even tending towards [i] in some contexts. Thus, a Kiwi who has neglected to bring his/her rucksack might say (to my ear) "I lift my beckpeck", or one might get a recommendation for "the beast ristaurant" in the neighborhood. After a while one gets used to this, and it's relatively easy to make the mental translation. We already had a bit of a head start as a result of owning the extended DVDs of The Lord of the Rings, and having watched the "Director's/Writers' Track"; Jackson and his co-writers have very characteristic NZ accents.

I should note that the above shifts don't result in ambiguity between, say, "ten" and "tin"; although the former sounds much like our pronunciation of the latter, the two sound distinctly different as spoken by New Zealanders.

¹I trust my readers will forgive my use of the ASCII representations of IPA symbols. It's difficult to talk about this stuff without using IPA, but getting my hands on a real IPA font looks like more trouble than I feel like going to.



It seemed to me that certain speakers -- women more than men, and public address announcers in particular (such as the conductor/tour guide on the TranzAlpine train) -- spoke with an exaggerated variation in rise and fall, especially tending toward a rise in pitch at the end of a sentence, almost as if asking a question. I found that this hindered rather than enhanced intelligibility.


There were, or course, some vocabulary variations; in most cases, these are similar to the differences between American and British usage (petrol, lift²), and thus readily recognizable. Other vocabulary variations may be mentioned in other contexts (road signs, menus, etc.).

²There seems to be some ambiguity about this one; hotel clerks tended to direct us to "elevators", which jwg suggested might be because they had already noticed that we were Americans; but the signs in the hotels also often said "elevators" as well; however, the signs in the boxes themselves that referred to capacity and/or inspection records generally said "lift".³

³In this context, not the opposite of "right".