New zealand why english

Ready to learn? Pick a language to get started! The First Dialect Preserved On Tape Something that makes the New Zealand accent a talking point among linguists is that it was the first dialect to have its entire development recorded on tape. But not everyone was fond of the burgeoning Kiwi accent. Small Steps To Confidence Despite those Kiwi kids successfully infecting their teachers with our dreaded twang, some level of self-consciousness around our accent continues to cling on today.

The New Zealand Accent Today Being such a small nation, the opinions of the rest of the world have always mattered to us. So, is NZ English easy for native Englanders to understand?

Especially for a tourist faced with words like munted or pakaru broken , dairy off-licence or small supermarket , stoked happy, pleased, relieved and bach small holiday home. Wellies is the capital city, not protective footwear although wellies will come in handy in Wellies. Root is used mostly to refer to sex. Oh, and watch out for irony. Because spoken Kiwinglish is relentlessly tongue-in-cheek. When we say one thing, we probably mean the other. And quite nice is generally used to refer to something that is the complete opposite.

As is used ubiquitously to exaggerate any preceding adjective, like hungry as very hungry and beached as well and truly stuck or in difficult circumstances. Most New Zealand words and usages, like most new elements in all vocabularies everywhere, are initially coined or borrowed in the spoken language and only subsequently set down in writing. The earliest examples of this process here are traceable to the first English speakers to visit Aotearoa and their encounters with an unfamiliar natural environment and indigenous culture.

More appear in the early 19th-century accounts of Savage, Nicholas and all subsequent travellers and colonists whose observations about this faraway land were written down and set before a fascinated British readership.

This New Zealand vocabulary was not at first part of New Zealand English, since that did not yet exist. It circulated at first ephemerally in Britain , but its longer-term survival was to be as part of a written New Zealand English that eventually developed alongside a spoken New Zealand English in the decades following The rapid development of a range of printed materials for a steadily growing colonial readership and use gave New Zealandisms, old and new, a permanent home. Some terms had and have a limited lifespan, but no word once printed is ever lost from the language entirely, and shortlived expressions are often significant markers of a particular historical era 'swaggie', 'six o'clock swill', 'Rogernomics'.

By the end of the 19th century, the English vocabulary in Australia and New Zealand had assumed a sufficiently different character from that in Britain or North America to prompt the first lexicographical accounts of its distinctive usages.

Also in , a supplement of Australian and New Zealand words prepared by Joshua Lake was published in an Australasian edition of the massive Webster's International Dictionary.

After this initial flourish, Australasian lexicography virtually ground to a halt for nearly two-thirds of the 20th century. Dictionaries compiled in England, especially those of the Oxford 'family' including the Concise and Pocket Oxfords first editions and respectively became standard reference works in New Zealand also, though they contained almost no Australasian usage.

The educational climate in particular did not encourage recognition of linguistic difference in New Zealand, though at least one school dictionary in the s had a short supplement of Australian and New Zealand vocabulary.

One or two substantial specialist accounts of the local vocabulary also appeared, for example 'A sheep station glossary' by L. Colloquialism and slang were felt to be the main and therefore somewhat disreputable way in which New Zealand usage was distinctive from English elsewhere, a view evidently reflected in the title of Sidney Baker 's New Zealand Slang: A Dictionary of Colloquialisms This valuable study of New Zealand words is neither a dictionary in the alphabetical manner, nor confined to slang and colloquialism.

Participants were asked to rate words on a scale from 1 definitely NZ to 6 definitely Australian. The words contained one of eight different vowels. Frequency and stereotypicality effects as well as nasality were also investigated. The results demonstrate that dialect identification is a complex process that requires taking into account many different interacting factors of speech perception, social and regional variation of vowels and issues of clear speech versus conversational speech.

Although overall performing quite accurately on the task, New Zealanders and Australians seem to perceive each other's speech inherently differently. I argue that this is due to different default configurations of their vowel spaces. Furthermore, a perceptual asymmetry between New Zealanders and Australians concerning the type of vowel has been observed. Reinforcing exemplar models of speech perception, it has also been shown that frequency of a word influences a listener's accuracy in identifying an accent.

Moreover, nasality seems to function as an intensifier of stereotypes.