'Colonial twang' part of our identity

Fush and chups. Home growen. Neow.

Nothin' to be ashamed of, a Canterbury linguist says.

The "colonial twang", once seen as an abomination of the King's English, is an irrepressible mark of every Kiwi's identity and history, Canterbury University associate professor of linguistics Elizabeth Gordon told an audience at the university.

In the early 1900s, teachers cringed as small voices began asking the "toime" or mentioning "teown heouses". In response, the Government produced speech-training bulletins to curb the evolving accent.

But theirs was a lost cause, Professor Gordon said, in the first of a three-part lecture series this month on "Finding your own voice: the English language in New Zealand".

Efforts by teachers, parents and school inspectors to stop children's changing accents may have delayed the use of the New Zealand accent in some places, but its development to what we hear today was inevitable.

"People don't like language change, but a living language has to change," Ms Gordon said.

Like the Australian and South African accents, the New Zealand accent emerged from a mix of immigrant accents, with the greatest influence coming from southern England. By 1900, people all over New Zealand were complaining about a dreadful "colonial twang", Ms Gordon said.

The changing accent fast became fodder for the "complaint tradition" in New Zealand, with critics blaming laziness for the disappearance of "l" in words like "milk" and "feel", but Professor Gordon said this was ignorant.

"We don't believe in laziness. It's no more lazy to pronounce a vowel than to pronounce an 'l'."

One particularly acidic Dunedin-based journal editor, Charles Baeyertz, said in the early 1900s that a bad local accent "is not bad because it is local, but merely because it is vile on general principles. It is hateful as a bad egg is hateful".

Recent studies show women's accents have advanced faster than men's. Females were more likely to pronounce "rabbit" like "rebbit", for reasons unknown to Ms Gordon.

However, they were also more conscious of negative attitudes about certain pronunciation, prompting them to revert to "conservative" English in some situations.

- NZPA