Story: Speech and accent

A recent vowel change in New Zealand English is the raising of the DRESS vowel into the area of the FLEECE vowel – this means that 'best' sounds like 'beast' and 'bed' like 'bead'. Here University of Canterbury linguistics scholar Jen Hay explains this change to radio journalist Kim Hill, using her own name as an example, in this 2009 interview.

Transcript

Interviewer: How do you say your name? 

How do I say my name? My name is Jen Hay. 

Interviewer: And what do the Americans hear? When you said that? 

Yeah, so my name is kind of problematic actually in terms of introducing myself to Americans because it contains the problem about or one of the big problem vowels in terms of misperceptions and that's the 'e' vowel. The vowel that's in Jen. So that sounds when I say it to Americans more like 'Jean'. So and that's because of the way that the vowel has been changing. So I actually have given up long given up introducing myself as Jen to Americans I would see my name is Jennifer and then once they've got that then they're able to shorten it. But the vowel 'e' in Jen, which we call the dress vowel, it's easier when we're talking about these vowels to give them names.

Interviewer: As in the vowel in 'dress'? 

That's right. So that's a vowel that occurs in the word dress and head and Jen. It has been moving higher and higher in the mouth meaning the way that we pronounce it the position of the tongue is moving closer and closer to the roof of the mouth. So now actually it's very close to the way that the vowel and the word fleece, the 'e' vowel is pronounced. In fact for some young New Zealanders it's even higher. So my name would be something it really would be Jean, Jean.