Close up on Research

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Americans, Australians, New Zealanders....they all call themselves 'English speakers'. Purists, of course, would beg to differ. After all, in England, a smoothie is a lascivious admirer, not a milkshake made with fresh fruit. And, as an English woman, if your name is Sheila - or even Barbie - a trip to Oz could be very confusing. Linguist Nicola Woods would argue, though, that there's no such thing as 'pure' English. She's part of a British-New Zealand research team investigating the origins and development of New Zealand English.

"There are differences on many levels between New Zealand English and British English. They use words and grammatical constructions we don't use, but the main difference really is in the way we pronounce words. So for example where we would say "hair" and "hear" differently, in New Zealand English they wouldn't make a distinction between the two pronunciations. It works in reverse too - they sometimes split apart sounds that we don't. So in British English "groan" and "grown" are pronounced the same, but in New Zealand English "grown" has two syllables. People say New Zealanders talk like they do because they have to keep their mouths closed to protect themselves from all the sand. But of course it's a little more complicated than that....

We use language - and particularly the way we pronounce words - to give ourselves a sense of identity and affiliate ourselves with others. In a new land of adoption, distinct accents and dialects will develop as part of that process. One way in which accents can develop is from settlers interacting with indigenous people. But there isn't a great deal of Maori in New Zealand English, partly because in the early years there was a constant situation of aggression between them. The sorts of Maori language which appear in New Zealand English are words for things that the Europeans didn't recognise, or things they needed but didn't have. So words for some trees and animals in New Zealand are still the original Maori words, because there has never been an English equivalent.

I was in New Zealand in 1992-4 to collect data for the project. The New Zealand broadcasting company made archive recordings of people in communities across the country in the 1940s, and it's a wonderful source of language data. I picked on one small community called Arrowtown, which is an old gold-mining town in the South Island, and I traced the descendants of the people who had been recorded. I recorded their children, who are now about the same age as the parents were when they were recorded, and then I spoke to their sons and daughters, and the children they had. This means I now have a truly inter-generational study of the way language use has changed in New Zealand this century. Most studies look at language change over apparent time, by interviewing different generations, but at the same point in time. A real time method shows how complex and convoluted language change really is.

There is a school of thought which assumes that language incorporates a 'colonial lag' - that many aspects of the way people speak in New Zealand today can be traced back to the dialects of original settlers. When mass migration started in about 1840, there were pockets in which settlers from certain areas stayed. So the south part of the South Island had a lot of Scottish people living there. In New Zealand "i", is pronounced "uh", so they say "fush and chups". (In fact, this is the only foolproof way to tell the difference between a New Zealander and an Australian - Australians pronounce "i" more like "ie", so they say "fiesh and chieps".) There has been a theory that the "uh" is a leftover from the Glaswegian accent, and in Glasgow they do also say "fush and chups". But it's a very static view, this notion that you can trace all aspects of New Zealand pronunciation back to the original dialects. Everything we know about language tells us that it's dynamic and it changes. From my study it was clear that the New Zealand "uh" wasn't used by the 1940s generation. It has actually only developed over the last 40 years, and this undermines the assumption that traits can be easily traced in language. It's much more complicated than that.

One of the biggest questions in language studies is "why do languages change?". If you think about it, an efficient system might be a language we could rely on to pretty much always sound the same. But language is organic, it is always changing. The New Zealand "uh" is something which has developed over time, seemingly for no 'reason'. There is no definite explanation for this change, just like there isn't a definite explanation for New Zealand English and Australian English sounding so similar. But that's another story altogether....."