Thursday 18 October 2012

Land of the long lost vowel.

When I was a child it was difficult to pick a Kiwi in our midst. No more. But before I proceed, I must assure everyone, particularly my Kiwi family and the rest of them that this is not intended as a slight in any way. In the year 2000, I flew back from overseas with Air NZ. As is often the case when one comes from an environment that is perceived, or actually is a threat, when one steps aboard the home flight, there is a sigh of relief. The moment an Air NZ hostess smiled a ‘Wilcem aboard’, I felt I was already home.

 What seems to have happened is that the short vowel sounds have taken a step to the right, so ‘a’ as in 'apple', as spoken by anyone else in the English speaking world, except perhaps S Africa, becomes ‘e’ as in 'berry'. Then ‘e’ becomes ‘i’ as in 'skittle' and ‘i’ disappears, to become a stop, as in ‘fsh-n-chps’. Now to complete the set, ‘u’ becomes a sort of tortured ‘a’. I am sure NZ-ers are happy with that, but I often have problems understanding our nearest neighbours, who are, I claim, our best friends on the planet. So what happened that pushed their accent so far from the middle?

It seems that we humans are not happy to share an accent with our 'just over the border' neighbours. It could simply be to express a separate identity but I suspect it is for security. We go to great lengths to create almost-impossible-to-mimic differences and there is a good reason based on ‘survival of the fittest’ theory. Of course, we use all sorts of 'in' language; jargon and such which serves the purpose of keeping outsiders guessing and if one does attempt to join in, we can throw a bit of jargon around and smile at each other as we make the outsider look a dill.

 So, we start with the premise that NZ-ers as a whole are more closely related to each other genetically than they are to Australians, so if there ever was a war between these two highly competitive but staunchly friendly nations, we and they would be able to distinguish between friend and foe to protect our respective gene pools. So there you have it.

Now, to apply that hypothesis to the many and sometimes way-out accents one finds in Britain, including that spoken by the broadest of Scots, we can assume they have a bloody and conflict ridden history. I seem to remember reading something about the occasional barney in ‘1066 and all That’. But I could be wrong.

19 comments:

  1. I grew up within 50 miles of Canada and was always curious about their strange way of speaking "oot", eh?

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    1. Many years ago I worked as Musical Director for Hawaiian singer Steve Logan during his Australian tour. He remarked in jest: 'Until I came here, I was unaware I had an accent!'

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  2. I've lived in the North, South, East, West in good ole USofA ... folks still ask if I'm from Minnesota ~ just TRY getting rid of/altering that accent ~~ no way .. don'tcha know ~ oh yah!!

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  3. I know I have gone through my life exposed to the Australian accent, Malaysian accent, Canadian accent, New York accent, Hong Kong accent, Jamaican accent, Trinidad accent, Kelantanese accent, Indian accent etc etc etc English. And of course the Queen's English, as well as Mr Bean's accent. I hardly know what is proper and/or unique to each English accent anymore!

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    1. But I bet you can pick a Scott or Irish from the accent! There are differences in accents now in Australia. Adelaidians, substitute the sound of 'w' for the letter'l'. So 'school' becomes 'schew'. But when a word starts with 'l', it is pronounced as 'l', so there is nothing 'wong' with 'long'.
      In some areas, the long 'a' is used too, so 'grant' becomes 'grarnt', but that is also seen as a posh affectation by many.
      Our Prime Minister does both and reveals her SA roots but I would never accuse her of being posh.

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  4. My downstairs neighbours are Kiwis - I remember discussing a rugby match with them one day, in particular a certain player "Oh he was shut" one said - then clocking my bewildered expression added "That doesn't mean closed".

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    1. Now that I have mentioned our Prime Minister, I can also tell you her parents immigrated from Wales. I once worked with a Welsh girl and I loved the musical accent. Her basic vowel sounds were maybe stretched and a lilt added, but the basic sound was left intact.
      You are right about the Kiwi 'shut'. What I described as a 'stop' is replaced in some words by 'u', so maybe the up to date version of 'fish and chips' is 'fush 'n chups'!

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  5. So, if I, an American, come down and join one of the warring sides, my uniform alone will tell my comrades which side I am on. If they don't believe me, I will be shot as a spy, and it is for this reason that I will not be coming down to support such a war. Otherwise, it would be loads of fun, you and me, side by side, running through a muddy field with our bayonets attached while men are blown to bits all around us. All of the local papers would be full of news about the two of us (what with me having joined the war effort only because of my fondness for you), and we could afterwards co-author a book about all the times we saved one another's lives.

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    1. Forget the bayonet charges in muddy fields. Been there, done that (in training). Let's just write the novel and fill it with bullshit like a real history book!

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  6. Here in the states there are definite differences in regional pronunciations.
    One can tell a New Yorker from a Bostonian and a Texan from someone from Alabama. However on the west coast it gets a bit more difficult- except for the LA Valley girl ridiculous accent we all pretty much sound the same- unless of course we began someplace else.

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  7. Even from here I can pick a Bostonian from a Texan by accent if not by their politics. :-)

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  8. As a Kiwi, I'm glad to distance myself from the harsh Australian vowel sounds, though I grarnt you, when I returned to my homeland after having luvved in Aussie for 12 years it was a week or two before I could decipher some words as spoken by some of my countrymen. I read recently about an academic study of Australian dialectic evolution, which reported a trend in Queensland toward Kiwi vowel sounds.

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    1. Hello Keith. I am not criticising the accent, just noting its existence and proposing a reason accents exist.
      Queenslanders do wish to present an image that is different from southern states, and of course developing a unique accent is a way of expressing it. I have one sister who was bred in Qld and you are right. I could identify her state of origin by her accent but I do not hear a lot of Kiwi in it... yet.

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    2. Hello Keith. I am not criticising the accent, just noting its existence and proposing a reason accents exist.
      Queenslanders do wish to present an image that is different from southern states, and of course developing a unique accent is a way of expressing it. I have one sister who was bred in Qld and you are right. I could identify her state of origin by her accent but I do not hear a lot of Kiwi in it... yet.

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    3. I think it was assumed in the study I referred to that the huge influx of Kiwis into Queensland in recent years is influencing the accent.
      Stafford, I didn't interpret your comments as criticism. My response, excepting the reference to my difficulty upon returning home, was tongue-in-cheek.

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  9. What happened to Bondi as the fave Kiwi hang out?
    Sorry I didn't realise you were talking tongue in cheek... no wonder it sounded odd!
    And, a Kiwi told me recently that her coming to Oz raised the average IQ of both countries!
    I am still trying to work that one out. :-)

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  10. What happened to Bondi as the fave Kiwi hang out?
    Sorry I didn't realise you were talking tongue in cheek... no wonder it sounded odd!
    And, a Kiwi told me recently that her coming to Oz raised the average IQ of both countries!
    I am still trying to work that one out. :-)

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