The world. Discovered by New Zealand in the 1970s. Photo: Kyle Glenn on Unsplash
I can’t tell you how much I love that we live in a multicultural world. The one I grew up in, a farming community near Auckland in the 1960s, was barely even bi-cultural. About the closest I got to encountering anything Māori was hearing Rod Derrett, a Pākehā musician, sing Puha and Pakeha on national radio’s Sunday morning children’s programme. Considered harmless fun at the time by those in charge of broadcasting, it’s about a Māori warrior who decides that the leafy green puha (a type of sow thistle) would be way more tasty boiled up in a pot with a white person bubbling away beside it. It’s hard to imagine any broadcaster playing it to any audience today, let alone to a nation of impressionable tykes.
When I was 10, our family moved to another rural community in the lower north where Māori made up a fair chunk of the population. While I was busy getting my young head around the fact that brown people existed, New Zealand was busy opening up its borders to the world in a way it hadn’t before. First, we welcomed in people from the Pacific Islands - countries like Samoa, Tonga and Niue. When I say “welcomed”, I mean “allowed in begrudgingly so they could do the shitty jobs that no one else would do”. When the economy began tanking a few years later, we couldn’t round up those who’d outstayed their welcome fast enough by launching terrifying police raids on their homes at dawn while they and their families were still sleeping.
About the same time, we also twigged that we had neighbours to the north and that many were closer to us, geographically, than the UK, the country we’d been cuddling up to for over 150 years. So it was that the number of Asians and Indians in New Zealand rose, along with people from even more exotic places, all bringing their strange languages, beliefs, recipe books, skin colours and accents with them.
Some spoke English, some didn’t. Of those who didn’t, some began learning it while others left that job to the next generation - and who can blame them?
If you’ve ever learned a new language as an adult, you’ll know that mastering its unfamiliar sounds is a steep, perhaps impossible, hill to climb. The closest sound to b in Samoan is p, making a word like book hard to pronounce other than pook. Japanese doesn’t distinguish between l and r, which makes it challenging to even hear them as distinct sounds, let alone pronounce them differently.
Native English speakers have no cause to be smug, either. My wife, a fluent Gujarati speaker, has been trying gamely for years to have me pronounce the letter t as she does - somewhere between a t as I know it and a d. Her persistence is admirable, but also, on the evidence to date, futile.
If you want access to the full range of sounds in a language, you probably need to learn it before puberty. And if you want to do it without any trace of your native accent, you almost certainly must learn it by then. One famous example of this is Henry Kissinger, who fled Germany with his family at the age of 15 and retained his Bavarian accent for the rest of his life. His younger brother, Walter, however, lost his. When asked why, Walter quipped that it was “because I am the Kissinger who listens”. But that wasn’t the reason - it was because he had not quite reached puberty when the family arrived in America.
Then there are the varying accents among those who share the same first language. When I got lost at LA Airport years ago I asked a black security guard where I could find the Air New Zealand check-in counter. He eyed me the way you would a crazed person with a knife and said “what you want a chicken counter for?” I didn’t have the guts to tell him I planned to use it to wangle my way onto a plane.
How regional accents arise is a matter of interest to language experts. It’s widely agreed - somewhat non-controversially, I might add - that they come about when a group of speakers within a language become isolated. Evolutionary-like forces then kick in, with small variations in pronunciation accumulating over time until a distinct accent is born.
Let the process run long enough, and you may even get a new dialect (where some words become unrecognisable and the meanings of others change dramatically) or a whole new language. That’s exactly how proto-Germanic eventually became German, English, Swedish and a host of other languages, many of them now extinct.
There’s evidence that regional accents today are becoming less distinct. Social media is often cited as one cause, as is greater mobility. A recent survey of seven generations of native Georgian speakers (the US state, not the country) found that the Southern drawl was less marked among younger speakers. In the 1980s, researchers found that 80% of Texans had what they called a Texan accent. By 2013, only a third did. One reason, of course, could be that there are more non-native Texans in the state than there used to be. But another is what linguists call “dialect levelling”, which softens not only differences in accent, but also word choices and other elements that make your speech distinctly local to where you grew up.
If you’re a decade or two younger than me and come from somewhere that the rest of the world imagines has a strong, easily identified accent, you may have been told more than once (possibly by older people) that “you don’t sound like you come from [that place]”. Chances are your accent is not as marked as it would have been a generation or two earlier, and your listener simply hasn’t kept up.
My New Zealand readers will be interested to know that your accent (yes, I know: what accent?) is also the result of dialect levelling. During the 1800s, the country experienced a flood of immigrants speaking mostly Australian English and Southern England English, and to a lesser extent, American English, Hiberno-English, Scottish English and the plummy Received Pronunciation of British royalty. Throw that lot in with Māori pronunciation and what started as a messy gumbo eventually homogenised into a new accent described in 1912 by English novelist Frank Swinnerton as “a carefully modulated murmur”.
Although dialect levelling is sweeping the globe right now, new accents can still emerge among isolated populations. Last year, scientists reported a common accent being born among their peers who overwintered in Antarctica. The changes are subtle, but measurable.
According to rumour, one not-so-subtle change occurs towards the end of winter as supplies run low, when penguin begins to get pronounced as dinner.
Bits and specious
What prompted this week’s subject was the recent edict from our newly elected government that all government agencies with dual Māori-English names must lead with their English title first (the exception being those that deal primarily with Māori). It’s a petty demand in my view that serves no other purpose than to show those pesky Maoris who’s really in charge. Pākehā living in 1960s New Zealand would have been proud.
Many agencies’ Māori names are not a simple translation of the English version, and often have an interesting story behind them. More here.
It’s hard for younger Kiwis to appreciate just how much living in New Zealand until the 1970s resembled living under a rock. To illustrate the point, in 1970 Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young released a bitter single called Ohio in response to the infamous Kent State shooting a few months earlier. The song got plenty of airplay on New Zealand radio and was believed by at least one DJ to be nothing more than another pleasant song from everyone’s favourite folk group.
In researching this week’s newsletter, I found this long and rewarding article from one of my heroes, Trevor Richards. A Pākehā who played an important role in having white New Zealanders wake up from their decades-long slumber, he recounts major events of his activist life through a lens that seems very familiar to this fellow pale-skinned Boomer. (There are many who’d say the waking up is far from complete, and I wouldn’t argue with them.)
Poet Maggie Smith discusses ambiguity with Adam Grant.
Puha and Pakeha: the video.
Quote of the week
Living is easy with eyes closed.
The Beatles (as shared by Trevor Richards)
"Chicken counter" gave me a good giggle this morning!
To my midwestern US ears, New Zealand always seems to pull all vowels toward /i/. Everything goes toward front and tense. The name Kiwi is appropriate.