New Zealand English Research Articles

Far From Home - The English in New Zealand

Far From Home - The English in New Zealand

The effects of dialectal differences on the identification of English vowels by native and nonnative listeners

This study attempts to investigate how dialectal differences of English affect the identification of English vowels by native and nonnative speakers of English. Served as listeners were native speakers of New Zealand English and Japanese. They heard and identified /i, ɪ, eɪ, ɛ, æ, ɑ, ʌ/ uttered by native speakers of New Zealand and American English. Repeated-measures ANOVAs were performed, respectively, for each listener group. The results revealed that there was no significant main effect of dialect (p = 0.013), but a main effects of vowels was found significant (p≺0.001). An interaction between dialect x vowels was also significant (p≺0.001). Pairwise comparisons revealed that NZ listeners identified NZ English /ɪ/, /ɑ/, /ʌ/ better than AM English counterparts (p≺0.05), but they identified AM English /æ/, /ɛ/ better than NZ English counterparts (p≺0.05). Native Japanese listeners, on the other hand, identified AM English vowels significantly better than NZ English vowels (p≺0.001). Particularly, they identified /i, ɪ, ɛ, æ/ uttered by AM English talkers than those uttered by NZ English talkers. However, native Japanese listeners identified NZ English /ɑ/ better than American English counterpart(p≺0.05).

Animacy in early New Zealand English

The literature suggests that animacy effects in present-day spoken New Zealand English (NZE) differ from animacy effects in other varieties of English. We seek to determine if such differences have a history in earlier NZE writing or not. We revisit two grammatical phenomena — progressives and genitives — that are well known to be sensitive to animacy effects, and we study these phenomena in corpora sampling 19th- and early 20th-century written NZE; for reference purposes, we also study parallel samples of 19th- and early 20th-century British English and American English. We indeed find significant regional differences between early New Zealand writing and the other varieties in terms of the effect that animacy has on the frequency and probabilities of grammatical phenomena.

Culturally motivated lexis in New Zealand English

ABSTRACT: This study uses corpus and media data to investigate cultural scripts in both spoken and written New Zealand English (NZE). The distinctiveness of words can be said to lie on a continuum, with some words being used exclusively in New Zealand and others used elsewhere but used more frequently in New Zealand. One aspect that makes New Zealand English distinct from the English of other former British colonies is the number of loan words borrowed from the indigenous Maori language. Data from the one million word written and one million word spoken Wellington (NZ) corpus and ICE‐NZ corpus, as well as from newspapers and magazines, is used to show what aspects of the lexicon reflect both the culture and attitude of the users.

Acoustic correlates of rhythm in New Zealand English: A diachronic study

AbstractThis paper reports on a large-scale diachronic investigation into the timing of New Zealand English (NZE), which points to changes in its rhythmic structure. The Pairwise Variability Index (PVI) was used to measure the mean variation in duration, intensity, and pitch of successive vowels in the speech of over 500 New Zealanders, born between 1851 and 1988. Normalized vocalic PVIs for duration have reduced over time, after allowing for changes in speech rate, supporting existing findings that stressed and unstressed vowels are less differentiated by duration in modern NZE than in other varieties of English. Rhythmically, syllable duration may be playing a reduced role in signalling prominence in NZE. This is supported by the finding that there have been contemporaneous changes in pitch and intensity variation. We discuss external and internal influences on the timing of NZE, including contact with Māori, the emergence of Māori English, and diachronic vowel shift.

Politeness and impoliteness in ethnic varieties of New Zealand English

Many aspects of New Zealand English (NZE) have been well described, especially the distinctive vocabulary, phonology, and some syntactic differences in relation to other varieties of English. Building on earlier research describing pragmatic features of NZE, and identifying ways in which politeness is expressed in New Zealand (NZ) workplace talk, this paper extends the socio-pragmatic analysis of NZE in several ways. Using the theoretical model that we have developed to analyse workplace interaction, we adopt an emic approach, focussing on intercultural interactions between Māori and Pākehā, and data from both Māori and Pākehā workplaces to throw light on distinctive features of politeness in NZE workplace discourse. With this goal, we examine the important value of egalitarianism in NZ society, and explore its pervasive influence on the ways in which politeness is interactionally achieved in different NZ communities of practice. We then discuss how this relates to the stylistic dimension of formality, exemplifying some distinctively NZ ways in which formality and informality are indexed in workplace interaction. The analysis illustrates how these influences are manifest in a number of specific aspects of workplace interaction, including small talk, humour, meeting protocols, and in the extension of the distinctive pragmatic particle eh to new domains.

Origins and development of New Zealand English

<strong><strong></strong></strong><p align="LEFT">T<span style="font-family: DejaVuSerifCondensed; font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: DejaVuSerifCondensed; font-size: small;">his paper provides an overview of the chief characteristics of a relatively new </span></span>variety of English, New Zealand English. After a brief historical sketch of the development of English in New Zealand, the paper highlights some of the grammatical patterns of the variety, before looking in more detail at the lexical features and characteristic pronunciations that make it a distinct variety. One of the significant infl uences on the development of New Zealand English has been contact with the Maori language and with Maori cultural traditions. This is refl ected in the presence of a large number of Maori words in common use in New Zealand English, as well as in the development of Maori English as an ethnic variety in New Zealand. Finally, the paper considers other sources of variation within New Zealand English, including early signs of regional diff erentiation as well as age- and gender-linked variation that have emerged in the patterns of change in progress that typify this new variety.</p>

English Associationalism in the British Empire: Yorkshire societies in New Zealand before the First World War

The rise of the Yorkshire societies in New Zealand coincided with the maturation of the British Dominions. Emerging as modern nations in their own right, New Zealand, Australia, South Africa and Canada were conscious of the need to consolidate selected cultural influences to inform the development of distinctive national identities. Given the fact that the English in New Zealand were the single largest British immigrant group, there seemed to be little need to assert or celebrate ‘Englishness’ and this was in stark contrast to the Scots whose widespread associational culture has been well-documented. Importantly, however, the emergence of Yorkshire, as opposed to English, societies reveals the crossroads of the immigrant experience: the dual identity. Asserting the importance of Yorkshire, its working-class culture and its people, as an important and defining facet of British success became very important at a time when immense social and economic changes were sweeping across Britain. The rise of Yorkshire societies abroad illuminates the desire for a greater recognition of the role played by the north in Britain's development at home and abroad. By examining the prevalence of Yorkshire societies in New Zealand, their membership, aims and activities, this article sheds new light on regional loyalties within English immigrant communities and their connection to Britain's imperial authority.

Performing Pasifika English in New Zealand

bro’Town is a popular animated comedy whose language is that of stylized performance. It deals with the adventures of a group of five teenage Pasifika boys growing up in Auckland, New Zealand, and showcases performances of the Englishes spoken by Polynesian immigrants and their descendants. A range of varieties are performed on the show by a handful of actors. We analyzed several linguistic variables in the speech of three of the main characters — the 14-year-old twins Vale and Valea, and their father Pepelo. Pepelo produces high levels of the vernacular features of DH-stopping and TH-fronting, consistent with his biography as a second-language speaker whose pronunciation is influenced by his native language, Samoan. His sons, as second-generation speakers, have these features too but at lower frequencies. The twins also differ from each other, with the streetwise Valea, who is more aligned with Pasifika youth culture, producing higher levels of the variables than the studious Vale. Pepelo produces unaspirated initial /p/s, again a Pasifika language feature, while his sons do not. Linking-/r/, however, appears to index a youth identity but not adult immigrant status. We conclude that performed varieties can reflect the linguistic production of a community in their selection of specific features. The quantitative patterns can be quite variable, but here succeed in indexing salient identities for their audiences.

A comparative analysis of invariant tags in three varieties of English

Discourse markers are a feature of everyday conversation — they signal attitudes and beliefs to their interlocutors beyond the base utterance. One particular type of discourse marker is the invariant tag (InT), for example New Zealand and Canadian English eh. Previous studies of InTs have clearly described InT uses in one language variety (e.g. Berland 1997, on London teenage talk; Stubbe and Holmes 1995, on NZ English; on sociolinguistic features e.g. Stubbe and Holmes 1995 and on single markers e.g. Avis 1972; Love 1973; Gibson 1977; Meyerhoff 1992 and 1994; Gold 2005, 2008 on eh). However, the class of InTs has not yet been fully described, and the variety of approaches taken (corpus- and survey-based) does not easily allow for cross-varietal or cross-linguistic comparison. This study investigates InTs in three varieties of English from a corpus-based approach. It lists the InTs available in New Zealand, British and Indian English through their occurrences in their respective International Corpus of English (ICE) corpora, and compares usages of four tags across the varieties. The description offers a clearer overview of the InT class for descriptive grammars, as well as more explicit definitions and usage guides for e.g. EFL/ESL pedagogy. An unambiguous description of several InTs and their meanings will also allow more thorough comparison in studies of other English varieties. Finally, the results offer another viewpoint on the issue of representativeness in corpora with respect to regional versus national varieties of the Englishes.

Hybrid compounding in New Zealand English

ABSTRACT: This study investigates hybrid compound formation of Maori and English terms in present day New Zealand English (NZE). On the background of Maori and English language contact, the phenomenon of hybrid compounding emerges as a process that, on the one hand, symbolizes the vitality of the Maori element in NZE and, on the other hand, marks the integration of Maori concepts in New Zealand culture. The investigation is based on a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the most frequent Maori loans in hybrid compounds drawn from a popular New Zealand newspaper (The New Zealand Herald). While the quantitative part establishes the total number of Maori loans, their usage in hybrid compounds, and their individual productivity values, the qualitative investigation disentangles semantic referential patterns underlying the formation of hybrid compounds. This approach to analysing hybrid compounds unveils a series of referential clusters that emerge from the semantic frame of the Maori borrowings and that allow for a conceptual categorization of the hybrid compounds.

Disparity in student achievement within and across secondary schools: an analysis of department results in English, maths and science in New Zealand

It has been reported in the literature that the disparities of student achievement within schools are often larger than the disparity across schools. In the secondary school context, analysing student achievement data at department level enables a fine-grained approach to identifying particular departments and teachers within them that are enabling students to achieve. This paper describes the steps taken to compare the student assessment results of 41 New Zealand secondary school English, maths and science departments with each other. In some schools results across departments show considerable variation by subject and in other schools results across departments are similar.

On the role of vowel duration in the New Zealand English front vowel shift

AbstractThis article investigates the role of vowel duration in the front vowel system of New Zealand English (NZE), drawing on data obtained from speakers born between the 1890s and the 1930s. After providing a brief overview of the history of short vowels in NZE, a comprehensive analysis of front vowel duration in conjunction with a number of earlier results from formant frequency measurements will be presented. It will be shown that the front vowel system of NZE shows interaction between vowel duration and formant frequency. A number of implications that follow from these patterns for the front vowel system of NZE will be discussed. It will be argued that it is reasonable to divide up the class of short front vowels in NZE into a short set (consisting only of one vowel) and a “not-so-short set.” In addition, it will be concluded that phonological class membership is irrelevant to making generalizations over patterns of movements in vowel change.

/u/ fronting and /t/ aspiration in Māori and New Zealand English

AbstractThis article examines the relationship between the frontness of /u/ and the aspiration of /t/ in both Māori and New Zealand English (NZE). In both languages, these processes can be observed since the earliest recordings dating from the latter part of the nineteenth century. We report analyses of these developments for three groups of male speakers of Māori spanning the twentieth century. We compare the Māori analyses with analyses of related features of the speakers' English and of the English of monolingual contemporaries. The occurrence of these processes in Māori cannot be seen simply as interference from NZE as the Māori-speaking population became increasingly bilingual. We conclude that it was the arrival of English with its contrast between aspirated and unaspirated plosives, rather than direct borrowing, that was the trigger for the fronting of the hitherto stable back Māori /u/ vowel together with increased aspiration of /t/ before both /i/ and /u/.

When is a change not a change? A case study on the dialect origins of New Zealand English

ABSTRACTIn studying language change, variationists are, naturally perhaps, more interested in the new, innovative form than in the old conservative one, and because of the actuation problem, investigations of changes in progress very rarely are able to shed light on the change in its very earliest stages. In this article, I suggest that we should perhaps pay more attention than we have at present to the origins of the change (in addition to its route and destination) and the nature of the conservative form if we are to chart ongoing changes in an accurate way. Here, I highlight an example of a feature of New Zealand English (NZE) (realizations of themouthdiphthong with front mid-open onsets) that has, until recently, been assumed to have resulted from a change of the Southern Shift-kind—a raising and fronting to [εʊ~εƏ]—but which, as I demonstrate using contemporary and past dialectological, as well as sociodemographic evidence, did not undergo this change in this way. Indeed, the supposedly conservative [aʊ] form has barely been used at all as a conversational vernacular variant in NZE. I argue here that the present-day NZE realization is far more likely to be the outcome of a process of dialect leveling operating on the mixture of forms brought to New Zealand by British and Irish migrants in the 19th century. The moral of the story is that if we think we observe a change in progress from A to B, we need to provide evidence not just of the existence of B, but also of the prior existence of A.

National and ethnic identity markers

The New Zealand (NZ) short front vowels are often considered as a defining feature of New Zealand English (NZE), yet research which has considered data from both the Pakeha (NZ European) and the NZ Maori communities has noted slightly different patterns in the realisations of the vowel in the KIT lexical set in the respective communities (Bell 1997a, b; Warren and Bauer 2004). This paper compares the short front vowel series of NZ Maori students with that of NZ Samoan, Tongan, Cook Island and Niuean students and demonstrates how the NZ short front vowel series mark both similarity and difference across NZ communities. Our findings show that NZ Maori students have a greater degree of centralisation in their KIT vowel and a greater degree of raising of their DRESS and TRAP vowels than their NZ Pasifika counterparts. However, the manner in which the vowels raise and centralise distinguishes NZ Maori and Cook Island students from their NZ Samoan, Tongan and Niuean cohorts. The latter observation highlights problems with the pan-ethnic “Pasifika” label used to distinguish NZ Maori from other NZ Polynesian communities.

Constructing English in New Zealand: A report on a decade of reform

In 1991, the newly elected National Government of New Zealand set in train a major reform of the New Zealand national curriculum and, a little later, a major reform of the New Zealand qualifications system. These reforms have had a major impact on the construction of English as a subject in New Zealand secondary schools, and the work and professional identity of teachers. This article uses as a basis for analysis a framework which posits four paradigms for subject English and proceeds to examine the current national English curriculum in New Zealand for its underlying discourses. In specific terms, it explores questions of partition and progression, and terminology. In respect of progression, it argues that the current curriculum has imposed a flawed model on teachers and students, in part because of its commitment to the assignment of decontextualised outcomes statements (‘achievement objects’) to staged levels of student development (levels). It also argues that much of the terminology used by the document has had a negative impact on metalinguistic classroom practice. Finally, while it views the national English curriculum as a discursively mixed bag, it notes an absence of critical discourses and a tendency, in recent qualifications reforms, to construct English teachers as technicians and the subject as skills-based.

Gradient grammar: An effect of animacy on the syntax of give in New Zealand and American English

Bresnan et al. (2007) show that a statistical model can predict United States (US) English speakers’ syntactic choices with ‘give’-type verbs extremely accurately. They argue that these results are consistent with probabilistic models of grammar, which assume that grammar is quantitive, and learned from exposure to other speakers. Such a model would also predict syntactic differences across time and space which are reflected not only in the use of clear dialectal features or clear-cut changes in progress, but also in subtle factors such as the relative importance of conditioning factors, and changes over time in speakers’ preferences between equally well-formed variants. This paper investigates these predictions by comparing the grammar of phrases involving ‘give’ in New Zealand (NZ) and US English. We find that the grammar developed by Bresnan et al. for US English generalizes remarkably well to NZ English. NZ English is, however, subtly different, in that NZ English speakers appear to be more sensitive to the role of animacy. Further, we investigate changes over time in NZ English and find that the overall behavior of ‘give’ phrases has subtly shifted. We argue that these subtle differences in space and time provide support for the gradient nature of grammar, and are consistent with usage-based, probabilistic syntactic models.

Getting fed up with our feet: Contrast maintenance and the New Zealand English “short” front vowel shift

The dress vowel in New Zealand English (NZE) has been raising for some time, so that it now overlaps the acoustic space of fleece for many younger speakers. This article presents an acoustic analysis of the dress and fleece vowels of 80 speakers and shows that dress continues to raise in contemporary NZE so that for some speakers dress has risen above fleece and can be more front than fleece. fleece has diphthongized as a consequence, making it part of the New Zealand “short front vowel” shift. This suggests that the short/long distinction in New Zealand English may have broken down, at least for the front vowels. The diphthongization of fleece is most advanced in tokens that are followed by voiceless codas. These are the tokens that are most endangered by the high dress, as they are distinguished neither in acoustic space, nor by length.We wish to thank the students who made the original recordings for the Canterbury Corpus and our research assistants Deborah Sagee and Toby Macrae for help with digitizing and marking up the data. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the International Australian Conference on Speech Science and Technology, December 2004, and we are grateful to members of the audience for useful suggestions. Christian Langstrof, Elizabeth Gordon, and an anonymous referee have made useful comments on an earlier draft, and we are also indebted to Elliott Moreton, whose suggestions considerably facilitated our ability to make sense of this data set. This work was partially funded by a grant from the University of Cantebury (U6286).

Abjection as ‘Singular Politics’ in Janet Frame’s The Carpathians

Abjection as ‘Singular Politics’ in Janet Frame’s The Carpathians