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National Party leader Simon Bridges. Photo by Simon Watts/Getty Images
National Party leader Simon Bridges. Photo by Simon Watts/Getty Images

SocietyFebruary 25, 2018

Simon Bridges has the accent of New Zealand’s future. Get used to it

National Party leader Simon Bridges. Photo by Simon Watts/Getty Images
National Party leader Simon Bridges. Photo by Simon Watts/Getty Images

New Zealanders sometimes like to claim that they are a classless society but anyone studying New Zealand English would know this isn’t true, writes NZ language expert Elizabeth Gordon

In the early 1900s people were commenting on the newly developing New Zealand accent. They called it a “colonial twang” and they hated it. They said that the way young New Zealanders spoke was an impure disease, vile, muddy, a blot on our national life, evil sounding, corrupt, slovenly, unspeakably bad, mangled, twisted and debauched.

The general view was that the accent was the result of laziness which could be “cured” by regular lip and tongue exercises. In 1925 the NZ Department of Education produced a speech training bulletin to help with this. Schools were issued with a phonographic recording of King George V and Queen Mary delivering messages to the children of the Empire. New Zealand children were told that this was how they should speak.

In 1938 Professor Arnold Wall wrote a book entitled New Zealand English: How it should be spoken. In the introduction Wall stated that his book was designed for use by residents in New Zealand who wished to speak “good” English as practised by “the best speakers in the old land”. He went on to say that it wasn’t designed for “those who wanted to develop a new variety of English for this country”.

And that was the key to it. New Zealand children should be using the pronunciation of King George V and Queen Mary. New Zealand Broadcasters were trained in British Received pronunciation (RP). At my private girls’ school in the 1950s we had a weekly visit from an elocution teacher who made us produce vowels that no one would ever use outside the classroom. “Round by the cow house Mr Brown fell down.”

In the Radio New Zealand Sound Archives we have wonderful recordings of old New Zealanders, some born as early as the 1850s. This means that we can listen to the voices of those early speakers. We also have many written comments about the New Zealand accent. From this material we know that the early New Zealand accent was especially marked by the pronunciation of some diphthongs. Critics said that “house” was being pronounced “heouse” and “fine” was “foine”. Because these diphthongs were so stigmatised some socially conscious people would hypercorrect them. Charles Baeyertz, editor of the literary magazine The Triad, referred to this as “ay-fever”. He associated it with people in Christchurch, especially Papanui. He had heard a woman pronouncing the phone number “nine nine five” as “nayne nayne fayve”. Baeyertz said “this was worse or viler than what we are beginning to execrate as the Australian accent”.

Today we have other New Zealand vowel changes like the diphthong merger where people don’t differentiate between ear and air or cheer and chair. You can sit on a cheer and give a loud cheer and travel on Ear New Zealand.

We have our own New Zealand vowel shift which delights those who study language change. Technically what is happening is that the front vowels are rising. The vowel in pat has moved into the region of pet, and the vowel in pet has moved to pit or even peet. We know that these changes began in the 19th century. A more recent change is the move of pit to putt producing the famous “fush and chups” vowel. This was first complained about in the New Zealand Listener in the 1960s by letter writers annoyed at the way Alison Holst pronounced the word “fish”. Until recently most New Zealanders have been blissfully unaware of the state of their front vowels or merging diphthongs. These changes have been below the level of consciousness. It has always been outsiders who have commented on and laughed at the way we say things.

Over the past decades there has been a major change in attitudes towards the New Zealand accent. In 2018 no one would tell New Zealanders to speak like posh people from Britain. New Zealand voices are heard everywhere – even on the Concert Programme.

New Zealand English also contains some distinctive varieties within it. More and more we are hearing Māori NZ English and Pacific Island NZ English, varieties marked by some vowel differences and most noticeably by differences in rhythm and stress.

Regional variation has been around for a long time in Southland. This is marked by what linguists describe as the postvocalic “r” and the general public call the “rolling r” though it doesn’t actually roll. There is a considerable variation in the use of postvocalic /r/ in Southland with a few older speakers in rural areas using it in all possible contexts – in words like card, port, letter etc. But today you hear it mainly in words with the NURSE vowel – in purple shirt or fern bird, but not in horse and cart.

New Zealanders sometimes like to claim that they are a classless society but anyone studying New Zealand English would know this isn’t true. When I was seven I was moved from Sydenham primary school in a poor area of Christchurch to St Margaret’s College, a private girls’ school. At my new school I was immediately made aware that my manner of speaking was undesirable and I quickly made adjustments which received the scorn of my older brothers and the concern of my mother who ordered me to “take the plum out of my mouth”.

In our study of old recordings the first indications of the New Zealand accent appear in the speech of people, especially women, living in poorer circumstances – people like farm workers, shop assistants, housewives. The upper class people sound much more like people from England. There is a recording of Miss Brenda Bell of Palmerston in Otago, who talks about her titled family members. She could be mistaken for a speaker of old fashioned RP. even though she is a third generation New Zealander.

The Australian linguist AG Mitchell divided Australian speakers into three categories – cultivated, general and broad, and these categories have been used for New Zealand speakers also. Using RP as a reference point, “cultivated” speech is nearest to RP and “broad” speech most different from RP.

The “broad” New Zealand accent still attracts a negative stereotype or is seen as a joke. Whenever I played recordings of a speaker with a “broad”accent to my university class the students would laugh. (They also laughed at the “cultivated” speaker.) People laugh at Ginette McDonald’s character Lynn of Tawa who caricatures the “broad” NZ accent. People make fun of Simon Bridges’ pronunciation of English which has features of “broad” NZ English. People who wouldn’t dream of making jokes about a person’s gender or ethnicity are very happy to make adverse comments or jokes about speakers using a lower class variety of language. It doesn’t matter that this is no more a matter of personal choice than the colour of the speakers’ skin.

These issues have come up recently because of reactions to Simon Bridges’ pronunciation of New Zealand English and I am glad to see him being defended.

For an outsider’s perspective I invited the British sociolinguist Professor Peter Trudgill to listen to a recording of Simon Bridges.

He wrote this:

This is a fantastic New Zealand accent which I’m very excited to have heard, with many of the features which serve most strongly to distinguish the Kiwi from the Aussie. English-speaking people from the Northern Hemisphere generally have great trouble in telling Australians and New Zealanders from one another, but with Simon Bridges this is not the case. His is a very un-Australian accent with most of the innovating, modern NZ features which will over the coming decades take the two accents further apart.

The Kiwi accent is going to become more and more distinctive as the decades go by: all the accents of English around the world are gradually diverging from one another. Simon Bridges has an accent which is in many respects in the vanguard of this development in NZ. This is the accent of the New Zealand of the future, and people who don’t like it had better get used to it.

Today we can listen to recordings of people who were young men and women when the complaints about the early New Zealand accent were being made and we wonder what the fuss was about. They just sound like old New Zealanders. In 50 years time people will listen to recordings of Simon Bridges and wonder why on earth people were commenting on his pronunciation.

 

There is still a lot of misinformation about the abortion process. Photo: Getty Images
There is still a lot of misinformation about the abortion process. Photo: Getty Images

SocietyFebruary 24, 2018

It’s OK to be uncomfortable about abortion

There is still a lot of misinformation about the abortion process. Photo: Getty Images
There is still a lot of misinformation about the abortion process. Photo: Getty Images

With the announcement that Labour is moving towards abortion law reform, New Zealand is gearing up to talk about a topic that makes a lot of people uncomfortable. So how can we acknowledge and move past the discomfort towards a law that works?

In case you didn’t realise, abortion is still in the Crimes Act. Provision for abortion is made through technicalities and regulated by a set of outdated laws. Patients and healthcare providers are required to jump through hoops and sometimes even lie to obtain permission from two certifying consultants.

District Health Boards control access to abortion, and anti-choice board members regularly make life harder for both patients and providers. The law isn’t working and Labour have admitted it. This is good news, but it means a fight is coming.

I grew up pro-life and now I’m on the committee of ALRANZ Abortion Rights Aotearoa. Looking back at what I believed when I was 16 is weird, but it also helps me see both why the anti-choice movement is so zealous and why abortion is a human right.

I went to a Catholic high school where students regularly chose ‘the horrors of abortion’ as a topic for public speaking. We had pamphlets handed out in what should have been sex ed containing ‘case studies’ of women who had sex outside of marriage and terrible things happened to them. Like having an abortion that rendered them infertile for the rest of their lives.

Fiercely believing that abortion is the state-sanctioned killing of children to which everyone else turns a blind eye enables people to justify an unsettling amount of self-righteous awfulness. If you truly believe you’re saving the lives of innocent, terrified babies, why would you respect a person’s right to get into an abortion clinic unhindered?

Being pro-life is never a belief you’re encouraged to engage critically with. Like many things in both organised religion and teen peer groups, it just is. Abortion is bad. God is real. The guy who plays Michael in Roswell is way hotter than the guy who plays Max. Blowjobs aren’t sex and I’m definitely still a virgin.

Family Life International NZ’s Michael Loretz leads a vigil in prayer at the 40 Days for Life vigil in Auckland. Photo Alex Braae.

When I went to university, I got involved with student politics and the women’s rights movement and I quickly came to understand that a pro-life society would be terrifying. The idea of forced gestation and people being punished for taking matters into their own hands wasn’t something I had truly thought about before, and I came to realise that I was pro-choice. But I still thought I would never have an abortion myself, and boy did I feel smug about that.

Some people – like 20-year-old me – are so quick to bring up that while they could personally never do that, they’re still pro-choice. And that’s not very pro-choice at all. It’s virtue signalling that makes people who have had abortions feel shit.

As the story so often goes, after a pregnancy scare I realised I was a hypocritical little sod who would absolutely have an abortion. My road to all-out pro-choice activism was pretty short after that, and there’s a glib meme I now love that says ‘I bet you one unplanned pregnancy you’re actually pro-choice’.

My story is fairly common for people who went to religious schools or were raised pro-life. But even people who weren’t still live in a world where anti-choice pseudoscience and Christian teachings are accepted as fact.

Despite being debunked, the idea that women who’ve had abortions are more likely to suffer from mental health issues is still widely believed. People also commonly think abortion can create later fertility issues and that people often regret their abortion, despite studies saying otherwise.

And despite the Christian church being totally fine with abortion for centuries, the belief that life starts at conception has been absorbed as the dominant view by countries colonised by Christianity. Christian ideas are part of the fabric of our society, whether we’re Christian or not.

Even for people working to unlearn anti-choice propaganda, the topic of when life begins is still a deeply personal belief. The simple answer is not to engage with questions that truly have no right answer and let people chose what is right for them. And this is where pro-choice activism is vital.

In 2010, at a family planning conference, I was in the audience for a keynote speech by Ann Furedi, the chief executive of BPAS, the UK’s largest independent abortion provider. She said that every time a woman has an abortion it should be celebrated as her taking family planning into her own hands.

While I agree in principle, I think it’s a bloody hard ask that people celebrate their abortions in a society that stigmatises abortion, and even within an ideal society that doesn’t. Finding yourself with an unplanned pregnancy touches a whole lot of raw nerves for reasons I’ve outlined above.

And even if those nerves weren’t raw and we had a perfectly neutral society where all views were respected (but the provision of abortion was never at stake) it’s still going to be a hard choice for some. Irrespective of faith, the decision to terminate a pregnancy can weigh heavy on relationships, family, money, and health.

So yes, it’s okay to feel uncomfortable about abortion. It’s okay to feel that you could never have one. It’s okay to know people who have grieved over their choice, or perhaps even grieve over yours.

Most of the people who feel this way aren’t lobbying the government to ban abortion because they realise, like I did, that a society which forces people to carry out pregnancies they don’t want is a nightmarish hellscape no one wants to live in.

So maybe you’re in that category – you’re technically pro-choice but too uncomfortable with abortion to engage with the public battle that’s about to happen. Maybe you think that hellscape scenario is an overblown or unlikely outcome, despite the abortion battles United States, Australia, Poland and Ireland. Or maybe it’s just too messy of a topic for you to want to take a side in.

To you, I say the five words that dissolved my few remaining anti-choice sympathies: Banning abortion doesn’t stop abortions. Banning abortion stops safe abortions and it kills people. In fact, unsafe abortions kills around 50,000 people annually worldwide.

You’re about to have a lot of power. As the law is reviewed and a potential reform bill enters Parliament, politicians will invoke you constantly – the average person who is neither vehemently anti-choice nor all that comfortable talking about being pro-choice. This battle will be public and long and you’ll have many chances to affirm that yes it’s a tricky topic, yes it makes people uncomfortable, but you stand for the right to choose and a law which reflects that. You’re the silent majority, so please speak up.