The best accent.

When you travel a lot — even just within the U.S. — you get to hear a lot of different accents. These range from barely-comprehensible English on the mainly Gaelic-speaking island of Inishmore in Ireland, to the slow, drawling English in the American south, to my very favorite accent of all: Kiwi English in New Zealand!

I had to attempt to describe this accent in my undergraduate thesis, which I wrote about the New Zealand tourism industry. Here was the best I came up with:

If you’ve never heard a New Zealand accent before, it can sound like quite a garbled mess at first, so it probably deserves a brief explanation. There’s a good bit of Australian accent there (probably because the first settlers to New Zealand other than the Maori were seal hunters from Australia), but also a fair amount of British influence. Add in a slight Scottish lilt (especially in the south, where they still have a tendency to roll their “r”s), and perhaps you can begin to understand what a Kiwi (“Kiwi” here meaning a New Zealander, not a fuzzy fruit or flightless bird) sounds like. Or maybe not. It’s a lot to try and piece together, after all. But that’s exactly what a New Zealand dialect is – a conglomeration of all sorts of accents that, somehow, manage to form into a cohesive way of speaking. At least, as far as New Zealanders are concerned. Personally, I’m still trying to make sense of it.

An “i” will usually turn into a “u,” an “a” can often transform into an “i,” and, when it comes to the letter “e,” good luck trying to predict how it will be pronounced. “R”s often disappear, only to be snuck back into sentences in places where they really don’t belong. So whereas we Americans might say, “Yes, I saw you ordered the fish and chips again,” a Kiwi would say, “Yis, I soar you orded the fush end chups ageen.”

Unlike some foreign accents, New Zealand’s doesn’t really vary drastically from region to region. Of course, North Islanders (mainly Aucklanders and Wellingtonians) will accuse South Islanders (especially those from Invercargill) of bumbling around their words (not unlike Ohioans poking fun at West Virginians for their dialect), but my experience is that most of it seems to be nothing more than island rivalry. I’ve been to Invercargill, and they still sounded like Kiwis to me.

Can you hear the Kiwi lilt yet? If you’re still struggling to get a sense of what it sounds like, here are a couple of videos I found that may help:

This one attempts to describe the accent, and how it differs from a Aussie accent.

And this one is an interesting news piece from a few years back, focusing on how the Kiwi accent has actually become *more* Kiwi over the past few decades — and how most New Zealanders are really proud of that.

What’s your favorite foreign accent to listen to?

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