Kiwi accent puzzles scientists
11 Feb 2008
Scientists from around the world are working on the puzzle of the Kiwi accent.
The questions baffling linguists is how New Zealanders came to speak in such a distinctive dialect of English so soon after the arrival of British migrants in the 1840s and 50s.
The first generation of immigrants did little to change their speech, but their children started to adapt in a way that was still not totally understood.
Working together on the research project has been physicists from Edinburgh and Manchester universities, mathematicians from New Zealand and linguists from the United States.
Edinburgh University physicist Richard Blythe says, ''At the time this dialect arose there would have been between 100,000 and one million people living in New Zealand. With that big a number, it would be impossible for all the inhabitants to meet each other.''
Hundreds of migrants arriving in New Zealand had different dialects, but people were speaking in just one within 50 years.
The New Zealand accent, described as a ‘colonial twang’, was formed somewhere between 1850 and 1880. The sound of the accent is slightly nasalised with flattened vowel sounds and vowel shifting.
Researchers studying the accent origin have been analyzing material including radio interviews in the 1940s from the New Zealand National Broadcasting Service. A mathematical model has helped to trace how language changes were passed through the population.
Discoveries so far indicate the emergence of a standard New Zealand dialect is related to declining immigration at the beginning of the 20th century, improved transport links within the country and the growth of a class system.
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