Century-old voices reveal evolution of New Zealand accent

A new project analysing historic and recent recordings of Auckland speakers tests the findings of a rediscovered thesis from a linguist and phonetics expert from 1921.

Led by Professor Catherine Watson, an expert in phonetics and speech science in the Department of Electrical, Computer and Software Engineering, the research draws on the 104-year-old thesis by phonetician George Edward Thompson, rediscovered by postdoctoral fellow Dr Brooke Ross.

Thompson’s work was unusually detailed for its time and suggests that New Zealand English’s sound changes may have followed more typical patterns than previously believed, challenging the view that the accent evolved in unique or rare ways.

Watson says Thompson’s work was far more progressive and positive than general views of the New Zealand accent a century ago.

"What really hit us is how modern in his thinking his thesis was, and yet it was written over 100 years ago," says Watson.

"The establishment was aghast at this horrible-sounding accent and how it was deviating from the proper English of the home country. There were descriptions existing at the time about New Zealand English, but it was all what was wrong.

"Thompson was very positive about the New Zealand accent; he was excited by it, he saw it as the mark of a new country, a new community of people with an identity."

The research, supported by a $660,000 Marsden Fund grant awarded in 2024, is in the stage of initial analysis.

Watson and Ross, along with Dr Elaine Ballard (School of Psychology) and Professor Miriam Meyerhoff from All Soul College (University of Oxford), have so far assessed eight of the 20 archival recordings.

The recordings feature Aucklanders born in the early 1900s, though the recordings themselves took place when they were much older, between 1970 and 1990.

While the participants weren’t young when they got recorded, Ross adds that most of a person’s accent becomes relatively stable by the time they’re in their late teens.

"Your accent inevitably changes as you get older, but it changes a lot less from when you’re, say, 30 to 80 than it did when you were 10 to 20."

Ross’s postdoctoral research, which focused on modern Auckland English, serves as the research endpoint, while the archival records will help the pair ‘reverse engineer’ to find the starting point.

"We can’t be sure at this stage that all of those speakers are exactly representative of what Auckland sounded like at the time, but we have noticed some general trends that are quite interesting," says Ross.

"There’s a lot more stability in the overall vowel space than we might’ve expected from speakers born around 1900. And there were sound changes that we thought we were going to be capturing in progress, that seemed to already have been completed by the time that these speakers were developing their accents."

The stable features the team has been looking at include the New Zealand English 'point vowels' - the vowels exemplified in the words 'fleece', 'start and 'thought'.

They have also captured some sound changes in progress – like the 'short front vowel', the vowel in the word 'kit', more colloquially known as the 'fish-and-chips vowel'.

"We captured some speakers who have the high-front, almost Australian sounding vowel (feesh and cheeps) and then we have others who have that New Zealand ‘centralised’ kind of vowel (fush and chups), and then we have speakers who use both, which kind of indicates that’s something that’s happening at the time and hasn’t quite settled," says Ross.

The vowels in 'dress' and 'trap' - 'high-front' vowels – are also noticeably quite high and raised in modern New Zealand English, she says.

"There’s been a lot of discussion about when that started, how it happened, did they arrive raised?

"Through acoustic analysis techniques, we can track this vowel change... we’re capturing speakers who almost use one or the other."

A repeated comment in Thompson's 1921 thesis was that the New Zealand accent was developing faster in the North Island, specifically in Auckland, compared to other parts of the country.

It was the same conclusion found in Ross’s doctoral research of modern New Zealand English in Auckland.

Watson points to a linguistic theory that accents change where there’s 'super diversity'.

"Auckland is our super-diverse city, so when people say when you want to look at the new changes in accents, you go where it’s super diverse and see where it emanates out," she says.

"That’s one of the interesting things about Thompson, he observed the linguistic diversity of Auckland back in 1921 and suggested the future dialects of New Zealand would come from Auckland."

Ross adds that 'diversity' to Thompson meant something a little different.

"Diversity to Thompson meant more, different kinds of colonial and British people, Australian people than what we mean now, but it was the same kind of idea of all these different accents coming together.

"It was really fascinating to hear the same sort of thing was happening over 100 years ago at the initial development of New Zealand English as is happening in modern New Zealand English."