[Luke Skywalker, to Leia, somewhat wistfully] I care… [/LS,tL,sw]
A small factual question about the New Zealand accent. A one-time friend of mine – New Zealander living in England, and the only Kiwi I’ve ever known well – used always to pronounce “evening” (meaning “toward the end of the day”), with three syllables – as in “evening things up” = making them more equal. Is that standard NZ pronunciation, or was it just this guy’s personal quirk?
If you’re so offended that you sound like an Australian, then tell your country to get a new accent. New Zealanders don’t sound like Australians by sheer coincidence. You’re not on opposite sides of planet having having lived in complete isolation from each other for the past one thousand years. Your prejudices against Australia and not wanting to be associated with them doesn’t somehow magically make your accents more distinct. If America fought against Canada in a horribly and bloody war that spanned 50 years, that wouldn’t somehow make English people or New Zealanders or Chinese people more able to hear the differences in vowels and prosody between our two dialects.
It’s even in your sentence “how do you **mistake **us for Australians” - you don’t make mistakes on purpose. Get over yourself. We’re probably only asking to be polite, anyway. We don’t really care where you’re from.
I’m Australian, in short bursts and without hitting key sounds like “image”, I could mistake Kiwi for Strine.
Sounds like OP has a case of Trevorchappellitis.
Thank Christ I’m an American from the west coast and therefore don’t have an accent.
You probably aren’t as good at telling Canadians and Americans apart as you think you are. I’m American and even I can rarely tell our accents apart*. There are some Canadians with a thick accent that’s stereotypically “Canadian”, but even that accent is really, really, really close to that of my Wisconsin relatives. My mom has that thing with her "o"s, and she’s American.
- (This is, of course, filtering out really distinctive regional accents like Quebecois or New York).
My sister lived in Canada for like 7 years. I can tell her accent is different just because I know where she’s supposed to be from, but it doesn’t stand out from the normal variation you see within the United States. So I can tell her accent is different, just not specifically Canadian. Although she does occasionally use very quaint-sounding Canadian words like “pardon” when she didn’t hear what you said. I still preferred that to “please” when I lived in Ohio, though.
Teehee. There was a multi-page argument on this very board a while back wherein some posters absolutely denied the possibility that they have an accent. Would not have a bar of the comments made by others that everyone has an accent.
One of my colleagues pronounces it even-ing. Now I’m struggling to remember whether it’s one of the many Kiwis we have working with us. I won’t rest until I work out who it is.
Yeah, but Sandra - maybe it’s been too long since you went to Skooool, and in Canterbury we can only use our backyard Pooools for about four months of the year.
We do have some decent Fush and Chup stores though, as opposed to that feesh and cheeps they serve in Ozziland.
Mind you - with the recent drubbing that England got in the creekit maybe…
Or the one that insisted that all singing was in an American accent. snerk
'Nother 'Murikan chiming in here. Contrary to the national stereotype, I have traveled, can name most of the nations of the world, and can tell you without having to resort to Wikipedia what type of government Luxembourg has (a Grand Duchy). More to the point, I have visited both New Zealand and Australia, and know the difference between a silver fern and a stringybark.
To my American ears, Kiwis and Aussies sound very similar, Kiwis perhaps just a bit less broad. But I very much doubt I could tell the difference without a side-by-side comparison. Neither to me, however, sounds like a South African accent, which is very distinct.
In fact, the biggest linguistic difference I saw between the two sides of the Tasman Sea was more a matter of social register. Australians seemed a bit more…informal, linguistically. For example, public facilities that would in the U.S. be labeled “Restrooms” or “Men’s Room/Ladies’ Room” were “Toilets”, in Sydney. I don’t remember noticing if the same held in Auckland or Rotarua. Likewise, in Auckland I usually was greeted with “Hello”, or “May I help you?” when I entered a shop. In Sydney, one lovely saleswoman greeted me with an expansive “G’day, my darlin’! Howah yew?” One of my favorite memories was the sign on the balcony overlooking the crocodile exhibit at the Sydney Aquarium - “Don’t lean. If the fall doesn’t kill you, the croc will.”
As to the OP’s castigation of American parochialism, I’ll just point out that I am a sales person at a store - and I routinely work with native speakers of Amharic, Urdu, Arabic, Hindi, Spanish, Mandarin and Vietnamese.
Spot on, me old china! That’s one of the reasons for the difference between New England and Southern accents in the U.S. The people who settled Massachusetts Bay, Plymouth, and Providence Plantations were predominately - but by no means exclusively - East Anglian. Thus “Norwich” (which old timers pronounced “Norridge”, just like the British town) and “Boston” - I understand that the original Boston is a small village in Lincolnshire.
Virgina and the Carolinas, on the other hand, were settled by a much more linguistically mixed group, including Highland Scots, Cornish folk, Scotch-Irish from Ulster, and West Country people. In fact, on isolated islands like Tangier Island in Chesapeake Bay and the Outer Banks of North Carolina, you can still hear West Country phonemes in the dialect of the older natives. Ocracoke and Hatteras natives are called “Hoi Toiders”, because they preserve the “oi” diphthong that Brits associate with Devonshire and Dorsetshire.
I don’t know if this is the thread to mention it (I may have mentioned it years ago in another thread, my memory is getting dim nowadays), but there are only two accents in the world that actually grate on me: Kiwi and South African.
I have no idea why: it’s a purely visceral reaction, as I have never met a New Zealander or South African person I actively disliked, but the accents of both set my teeth on edge. I have a feeling that my objection to the SA accent might be due to my political ‘coming of age’ during the early anti-apartheid movements, and thus the Afrikaans = Arseholes equation makes some sort of subliminal sense. But NZed’ers? No freakin’ clue!
-------------------> Yeah, yeah, I’m running like mad from the thread now! 
The South African accent really does seem synonymous with racial tension in popular culture–I mean, the primary exposure most of us got to that accent was talk about “bleck borsteds” and so forth.
One of my good friends is married to a lovely South African woman, so it’s not like I haven’t seen the stereotype shattered IRL, but the accent really is closely associated with a kind of casual racism, IMHO.
Anecdotal only, but for what it’s worth…
I was once offered a job in Chicago.
I was sitting by the hotel pool in Florida, chatting with the guy in the next chair, who was from Chicago. Turned out that we were in the same line of work, and he needed somebody to fill a position, and after some conversation as regards the position and qualifications, he offered it to me. As things would work out, he thought I was also from Chicago, based on my accent.
When I explained that I was from Canada, and would have to go through the US immigration process, etc., he was shocked. “But you don’t sound Canadian! You don’t say ‘aboot’ and ‘hoose.’ You sound just like me!”
Needless to say, I did not (nor could I) take the job in Chicago. But the anecdote goes to show that when Americans think they can spot a Canadian by accent (“aboot,” etc,), they are sometimes mistaken.
Boston is a medium, and historically important, town, about a third of the population of the city of Lincoln.
Not that English people care a lot about either place.
A young guy at work used to manage a supermarket in St Ives, Sydney. It has one of the highest concentrations of white South Africans in Australia. This guy hates them with a passion and would often confront them about the way they spoke to staff.
Whenever South Africans come up in conversation he will start talking in a perfect South African accent, every comment laced with the casual racist invective he used to hear. He only has to say something bemoaning the failings of the “coloureds” to break me up.
So I guess I’m with you on the subliminal disregard.
I don’t much like the Kiwi accent either, and I had one! And probably still do, though it’s muted somewhat (I suffer from that affliction of disliking the sound of one’s own voice, so I can’t really comment objectively). I certainly hear it in my own family, who still live in NZ.
But some parts of the country have stronger accents than others, and it’s those places that bother me the most. Alan Brough has a very strong NZ accent that he long should’ve lost or been mellowed by now, but it’s still confrontationally prevalent. Richard Taylor’s accent really gets on my nerves, but that’s because it’s so weird and seems to be mixed in with something else. Whereas I don’t have any problem with Philippa Boyens’s or Karl Urban’s accents. So I don’t know what that’s about, really.
sorry!! I do my typing on an iphone and it makes it difficult to actually write and sometimes that damm predictive text takes over what I am trying to actually say.
When I lived in Berlin, a good friend was from Christchurch, NZ.
I even introduced her to her future (German) husband.
We had a grand old time and would hang out and have great conversations.
They moved to NZ and have been there many years.
Whenever I call them now, I can barely understand a word she says anymore! Her accent is thicker than glue. I even have problems speaking English with her husband, and often we just lapse into German - far easier.
Most of my side of the conversation is, “What?” “Huh?” “Come again?”
I have only had this problem a few times with “native English” speakers - where I don’t understand a damned word. Once was trying to communicate with a guy from some village in Scotland, and the other was a woman from Ghana. In both cases, you would have thought they were speaking Klingon for all I understood.
Yet oddly, the Scottish guy, Ghana girl and my friend in NZ could/can all understand my accent perfectly and never once need(ed) to ask me to repeat anything. Very weird to have one-sided conversations like that.