New Zealand English - Historical Development

Historical Development

A distinct New Zealand variant of the English language has been in existence since at least 1912, when Frank Arthur Swinnerton described it as a "carefully modulated murmur," though its history probably goes back further than that. From the beginning of the British settlement on the islands, a new dialect began to form by adopting Māori words to describe the different flora and fauna of New Zealand, for which English did not have any words of its own.

Audio recordings from the 1940s of very old New Zealanders captured the speech of those born to the first generation of settlers in New Zealand, which means linguists can hear the actual origin of the accent. For example, a recording of 97-year-old Mrs Hannah Cross, who was born in New Zealand in 1851 and lived there her whole life, shows she had a Scottish accent. Even some second generation New Zealanders did not have a noticeable "New Zealand accent", such as Mr Ernie Bissett, who was born in Kaitangata in 1894 and lived in New Zealand his entire life. But people growing up in the mining town of Arrowtown, where there was a mixture of accents, developed a recognizable New Zealand accent, such as Annie Hamilton, whose parents arrived there in 1862. The children growing up exposed to different accents picked up different features of these, but in their children, the second generation, there is a unification towards the ‘foundation accent’.