Kōrero: Speech and accent

Arnold Wall was a literary scholar at the University of Canterbury. After his retirement in 1932 he wrote a series of columns titled 'Our mother tongue' for the Press newspaper. Wall was highly critical of New Zealand pronunciation in these columns and in his book New Zealand English (1938). Later scholars were careful not to judge New Zealand pronunciation – they had an objective interest in the origins of New Zealand speech and how it evolved. Wall himself even moderated his stance and later repositioned himself as an non-judgmental recorder. Listen to some observations about New Zealand pronunciations which he recorded in 1951.

Transcript

Another peculiarity is evident only in a certain comparatively small group of words, but it is a very striking one. It seems that the modern New Zealand speaker does not like to use a long o, but prefers to shorten the sound in a number of words. An example is the word, coral. In English coral, in New Zealand caudal. The Coral Hall in Christchurch was 50 years ago always called the Coral Hall but not so very long ago it began to be the Caudal Hall. And this pronunciation is now very generally used, though I notice that some of the announcers at the main way YA stations carefully avoided and say coral. Other words of this group are for oral for oral, floro for floral, auction for auction, bulster for bolster, hydraulic for hydraulic, revote as revolt and jolt becomes jolt.