Story: Speech and accent

The first person to record and describe pronunciation in New Zealand was Samuel McBurney, a Scottish singing teacher and educationalist who emigrated to Australia in 1881. McBurney went on a lecture tour of Australia, New Zealand and North America in 1887, and during his time in New Zealand he noted the characteristics of pronunciation. His observations were published in part five of Alexander Ellis's book On early English pronunciation (1889). Listen to linguistics scholar Elizabeth Gordon explain some of McBurney’s findings.

Transcript

While he was in New Zealand, Mr McBurney wrote an article entitled 'Colonial pronunciation' which was published in the Christchurch Press. Here he commented on a number of things he heard in New Zealand, for example, the dropping of h's, the clipping of the final ing, he heard people saying singn' and chillin' and he heard a great variety of pronunciations of the words, down town. I think that would be likely because the ow diphthong varies considerably in different English dialects. But he also said that, I die, in New Zealand sounded more like, oi doy, and that particular pronunciation has been regularly commented on ever since. The short vowel in but and tub he said approached the sound in father, presumably, bart and tarb. Some of the features we would expect to find in New Zealand at this time. For example, the dropping of the h or the in ending for ing. They're common features of many British dialects and they still are today. Other things such as the oi doy pronunciation or the final e endings on words are more distinctively antipodean.