the accent

If you’ve never heard a New Zealand accent before, it can sound like quite a garbled mess at first, so it probably deserves a brief explanation. There’s a good bit of Australian accent there (probably because the first settlers to New Zealand other than the Maori were seal hunters from Australia), but also a fair amount of British influence. Add in a slight Scottish lilt (especially in the south, where they still have a tendency to roll their “r”s), and perhaps you can begin to understand what a Kiwi (“Kiwi” here meaning a New Zealander, not a fuzzy fruit or flightless bird) sounds like. Or maybe not. It’s a lot to try and piece together, after all. But that’s exactly what a New Zealand dialect is – a conglomeration of all sorts of accents that, somehow, manage to form into a cohesive way of speaking – at least as far as New Zealanders are concerned. Personally, I’m still trying to make sense of it.

An “i” will usually turn into a “u,” an “a” can often transform into an “i,” and, when it comes to the letter “e,” good luck trying to predict how it will be pronounced. “R”s often disappear, only to be snuck back into sentences in places where they really don’t belong. So whereas we Americans might say, “Yes, I saw you ordered the fish and chips again,” a Kiwi would say, “Yis, I soar you orded the fush end chups ageen.”

Unlike some foreign accents, New Zealand’s doesn’t really vary drastically from region to region. Of course, North Islanders (mainly Aucklanders and Wellingtonians) will accuse South Islanders (especially those from Invercargill) of bumbling around their words (not unlike Ohioans poking fun at West Virginians for their dialect), but my experience is that most of it seems to be nothing more than island rivalry. I’ve been to Invercargill, and they still sounded like Kiwis to me.