Many new words have been generated in the form of abbreviations and acronyms – especially from the names of government agencies. Work and Income, the employment and income support division of the Ministry of Social Development, was previously and widely known as WINZ, an abbreviation of Work and Income New Zealand. Listen to linguist Elizabeth Gordon talk about this and other acronyms, all of which require local knowledge if they are to be understood.
Transcript
The use of acronyms has been a productive new source of New Zealand English words. Think of the PPTA and the PSIS and the RSA and the TAB, that great New Zealand invention exported to Australia, and NCEA and so on. And then there are those like SOOBs where the initials are pronounced as words like ACT and DOC and HART and MOTAT and the mixtures like MFAT for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade. Now Collins English Dictionaries like to keep up to date with New Zealand acronyms and I have found at times this is quite a challenge. They had in their list of New Zealand acronyms, the DSW, the Department of Social Welfare. So I had to check to see what had happened to the DSW. And when I did I found that the NZES, the New Zealand Employment Service and the NZIS, the New Zealand Income Support had merged into WINZ, Work and Income New Zealand. But just to confuse matters this was known to Parliament as the DWI the Department of Work and Income, but the front line service centre still operate as WINZ. And then there was CYPS, Children and Young Person Service which then changed to CYF, Child Youth and Family and split off so that the old DSW had become the DWI, the MSP the Ministry of Social Policy and CYF, Child Youth and Family. And in 2001 the DWI and the MSP remerged into the MSD the Ministry of Social Development. Now I can go on but I'm gonna stop because I think this is enough to make my point which is that these acronyms whose lives can whose lives can be highly transitory are totally dependent on social and political organisations here in New Zealand.
Te whakamahi i tēnei tūemi
Te Ara - The Encyclopedia of New Zealand
by Melanie Lovell-Smith
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