Sounds like us: the Kiwi accent's evolution

During my OE in Edinburgh 20 years ago, I tried to borrow a pen from colleagues. “What do you want a pin for?” came the confused answer. “Not a pin – a pehn! Peh-n!” I said slowly, shaping the vowel a bit like the short ‘e’ in te reo Māori. “Oh, a pehn!” said the Scots. Before they handed over a ballpoint, they made me say ‘egg’. “Eigg!” they mimicked, giggling.

But young Aucklanders on their OE may no longer encounter such cruel barriers to accessing office supplies, according to a team of linguists: Professor Catherine Watson, Dr Brooke Ross (both in Electrical, Computer and Software Engineering), Associate Professor Elaine Ballard (Psychology) and Professor Miriam Meyerhoff (All Souls College, Oxford).

By looking at how the New Zealand English accent has changed over time, their Marsden-funded research aims to contribute to understandings of our national cultural identity, and shed light on the broader mechanisms of sound change and the impact of social diversity on the way we speak.

In her postgraduate research (supervised by the rest of the team), Brooke examined the vowel pronunciation of Aucklanders born in the mid-to-late 1990s, recorded in 2017/18 when they were aged 18 to 25. And she compared this with the vowel pronunciation of an older Auckland group (aged 40 to 70). She found the Auckland accent is becoming “less broad” – evolving away from some traditional characteristics.

Don’t worry, Brooke reassures that our iconic ‘fush and chups’ vowel “isn’t going anywhere”. Neither is our habit of pronouncing ‘ear’ the same as ‘air’, known as the ‘NEAR-SQUARE merger’. When Catherine moved to Australia for a time, she says “it was news to me the words ‘there’ and ‘their’ were different.” It’s ‘rarely’ an issue – unless it’s ‘really’ an issue.

But that ‘pen’/‘egg’ vowel – known to linguists as the ‘DRESS’ vowel – is definitely moving. Brooke’s research showed that while older Aucklanders (that is, everyone from older millennials upwards) pronounce it with slightly high, tightened jaws and relatively closed mouths, Gen Z are using a lower, more open mouth shape. So, relatively speaking, their sound is less like ‘driss’, and more like ‘dreh-ss’. ‘Peh-n’, not ‘pin’. 

Brooke’s study involved three varied communities: Mt Roskill (new migrants), Papatoetoe (established diversity) and Titirangi (mostly New Zealand European/Pākehā). Unexpectedly, Brooke found the DRESS vowel change in young people in all three suburbs, regardless of ethnic and migrant demographics.

It turns out Auckland’s super-diversity of language and accent groups is perfect to fast-track accent evolution: we’re all trying to be understood by each other. Between 1986 and 2006, Auckland’s overseas-born population grew from 23 percent to 37 percent (it’s now around 43 percent). So, we have a whole city of young people with varied backgrounds who met each other at school aged five, and moved toward ‘peh-n’ in the hope they would not be stabbed with pins by someone trying to be helpful.

What about the rest of the country? Brooke found that older people in Nelson sound like older people in Auckland – but the DRESS vowel of Nelson’s younger people is somewhere between the older cohort’s high-tight sound and the younger Auckland cohort’s lower, looser sound. So, accents in the rest of the country are changing too, but more slowly, given the regions’ relative lack of population diversity.

More cheekily: Auckland can’t evolve its own clear accent, because the rest of the country keeps copying it.

Generational change

Has Aotearoa New Zealand incubated multiple accents in English in other ways? Sociolinguist Elaine says the ‘cultivated versus broad’ accent gap is shrinking as our cultural cringe reduces. Other variations definitely exist; Taika Waititi celebrated what he called the “Polynesian bouncer” New Zealand accent with his character Korg in Thor: Ragnarok, while Southlanders and (separately) Pacific New Zealanders have ‘rhotic’ accents, which make pronounced ‘r’ sounds after vowels.

But “from an overseas perspective, we all sound New Zealand-ish, you know”, says Catherine. “We collectively, as a community – this [accent] is what we came up with. It's cool. I love the fact that any kid born in New Zealand, growing up, going to school – it doesn't matter what they look like – they'll have a New Zealand accent.”

Attending school is why accents in individuals are largely set by age seven, making most accent change generational: children growing up in the same place as their parents will sound slightly different. The New Zealand accent has homogenised over time, and Brooke says people born in the 1920s and 1930s sound recognisably New Zealand to modern ears. When a UK newspaper interviewed Auckland soldiers during the Second World War, mention was made of their “rich New Zealand accent”. Says Brooke: “To some extent, it's just a whole bunch of accents dumped on an island in the middle of nowhere and left to do its own thing for a hundred years.”

But alas, nobody really knows where the ‘fush and chups’ vowel – our very own innovation – comes from. Until recently, people thought it was a post-Second World War phenomenon, the result of a ‘push’ chain reaction of other vowel sounds bumping into each other. We apparently pronounce ‘pan’ like other accents might pronounce ‘pen’, so pen supposedly started sounding like ‘pin’, and in turn, ‘pin’ became more like ‘pun’ – therefore, ‘fish’ to ‘fush’. To use another chain: ‘had’ became ‘head’ became ‘hid’ became ‘hud’.  

But as satisfying as that sounds, such vowel changes are actually what researchers call “cognitively complex processes” – they require thinking. That means they don’t really ever happen (laziness, on the other hand, is a more common ‘internal factor’ for accent change: Elaine points out we once all pronounced the ‘k’ in ‘knee’).

So, New Zealand English was thought to be a curious outlier, a mystery. Until, that is, one afternoon in 2023 when Brooke stumbled across a forgotten 1921 doctorate thesis online. Written by an impressive polymath, George E. Thompson, it showed he was hearing ‘fush’ a generation before it was thought to exist, and also before other vowel sounds in the supposed push-chain had developed. Ergo, everyone’s standard, assumed theory was bunk. At least, it’s probably bunk – part of the Marsden Grant research is attempting to prove the veracity of George’s claims by comparing the vowel sounds of Aucklanders born between 1896 and 1914 to Brooke’s recordings of current generations.

Why did people push the unlikely push-chain theory of Kiwi accent creation?

“I think it was the sheer excitement of, ‘oh, we're different!’” says Catherine. “It was just cool, you know, ‘Little country down here, punching above our weight’. But the boringness of it all is we [as a field] were measuring the wrong things.”

Or perhaps – just not measuring all the right things. People were measuring vowel sounds from Scots-founded Dunedin and English-founded Christchurch – and marvelling at how the accents were surprisingly similar between those cities, as homogeneity is usually generated by cities each containing multiple accents. But until Brooke’s research, nobody thought to study the voices of New Zealand’s premier city of multiple accents as a set.

In fact, some vowel sounds previously identified as particular to Pacific New Zealand English (when compared with regional New Zealand English) actually turn out to be used by all Aucklanders, Pacific or otherwise. They’re just not used by the rest of New Zealand – yet.

A sense of fellowship

Accent is about identity, so while most change is generational, individuals can and do change their accents. Catherine was on a team that proved the Queen’s pronunciation became more like that of her subjects over the decades, by studying her Christmas broadcasts. As well as perceived egalitarianism, racism can be a driver for conscious change – and accents can be a matter of life or death.  

Multi-ethnic comedian Trevor Noah reports in his autobiography that when he was growing up in South Africa, he was able to build up enough trust to get out of sticky situations by being able to switch between the languages and accents of different black and white communities: “They were ready to do to me violent harm until they felt that we were part of the same tribe, and then we were cool. […] Maybe I didn’t look like you, but if I spoke like you, I was you.”

Elaine – who grew up in Auckland in a Chinese family, and who picked up a New Zealand accent at school in the classic way despite not previously speaking English – has noticed New Zealand-born Chinese sometimes have very broad New Zealand accents. “In some ways, I think it’s to do with affirming yourself: ‘I want you to notice that I actually sound like a member of this community. […] I want to ensure that my identity as a New Zealander is unquestionable’.”

Sometimes problematic, sometimes useful: when any of us hear someone else with our own accent, we usually make assumptions that we share certain cultural understandings. Catherine has previously developed voices for healthcare and communication robots – that study found that for New Zealanders, it’s important the robots speak with a Kiwi accent, and not a pre-programmed American accent, for example.

Says Elaine: “It’s the same thing when you go overseas and then you hear a New Zealand accent across the room – particularly if you haven’t encountered other New Zealanders for a long time. There is a sense of fellowship; they sound just like you.”