Why Do We Say Fush & Chups?
A Mark Winter cartoon, after the 2009 BBC survey was released.
Like any other Kiwi conversing with folks outside of our tucked-away corner of the globe, I’ve received an equal amount of mockery and praise for my so-called “New Zild'' accent. After a handful of podcast appearances I’m no stranger to having the accentuated “fush and chups'' line thrown at me or being complimented on the vocal inflections of my otherwise run-of-the-mill New Zealand accent. Quite a weird observation but I’ll take it.
As it turns out, the Kiwi accent is world-famous for its appeal, polling first in both Big 7 Travel’s 2019 hunt for the world’s sexiest accent and the BBC’s 2009 survey for the most attractive variant of English outside of the UK. Described as “outrageously charming,” our unique accent won over the hearts of Big 7 Travel readers, beating out the likes of the South African and Irish accents. So, what goes into our Casanova of an accent? To find an answer, I turned to Lynn Clark, head of UC’s linguistics department.
Straight off the bat, Lynn clears the air in acknowledging that New Zealand English is flat-out weird. She highlights that New Zealand has been an excellent test bed for observing how sound changes work due to how accelerated the development of the New Zealand English accent has been relative to other variants. With that comes an array of interesting phonetic (production and perception of sound) and phonological (organisation of sound) changes that have occurred within the Kiwi accent over time.
In the years that followed the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi, New Zealand saw rapid growth in its European population. While there was a strong presence of settlers from Southern England, the nation became a melting pot of different English speaking dialects. These towns featuring a mishmash of dialects were the best for fostering the development of what we perceive as a modern Kiwi accent, which was largely dictated by the generation to follow. A stable New Zealand English accent didn’t properly surface until the generation born around 1890, which would approximately have been second generation New Zealanders.
Perhaps the most prominent feature non-Kiwis will point out is the way that we pronounce our vowels. Linguists discuss vowels in two auditory dimensions: high to low and front to back. These spectrums represent the placement of the tongue in the mouth and can be used to visualise how accents differ from one another and have developed. Among a myriad of sliding pronunciations, the change of the “trap” and “dress” vowels are two trademark elements of the NZ English accent. The “a” in trap and “e” in dress have both been raised over the course of the twentieth century, meaning our tongues have moved closer to the roofs of our mouths when pronouncing these types of words.
Lynn Clark’s graph tracking vowel shifts in NZ speakers between those born from 1864 to 1982.
In the early 1900s, a “colonial twang” was reported to be developing in New Zealand. Samuel McBurney, a Scotsman teaching singing throughout Australia and New Zealand began taking notes on the various accents he heard during his travels. He noted that Kiwi children tended to shorten the “u” in words such as but and tub, producing a blunt sound. At the same time, school inspectors in New Zealand wrote of their growing frustration with the emerging youth accent. School boys caught flack for their careless pronunciation of vowels, where they began pronouncing chains of vowels (diphthongs and triphthongs) as a single syllable. This continues to ring true over a century later, where a slurry handling of vowels is ever so present. We also appear to have added an extra vowel as the letter “l” has sunk to the floor of our mouth, causing it to be pronounced as if it were one.
In embarking on this quest to unpack the secrets of speaking Kiwi, I was most curious about how te reo Māori has influenced New Zealand English. Traditional English accents are canonically stress-timed, meaning longer, louder syllables are spoken in regular intervals. Think of something like Shakespeare’s iambic pentameter. On the other hand, te reo is syllable-timed, giving equal weighting to each syllable. New Zealand English has grown to become syllable-timed just like te reo Māori and share a similar rhythm. The New Zealand English lexicon also features plenty of te reo words such as kai, kōrero, and an assortment of greetings and phrases.
Another core aspect of the modern Kiwi tongue is New Zealand’s departure from the rhoticity of England. Rhoticity refers to the pronunciation of “r” in all contexts. Whereas to be non-rhotic means to drop the “r” in some contexts. New Zealanders leaving the “r” out to dry is yet another fascinating change our good friend Mr. McBurney jotted in his notepad. While their parents were very much rhotic, the children he taught were not and dropped the “strong trilled final r” in words such as father or world. Similar to the shortening of “u,” the “r” generally became less prominently pronounced. You could say Kiwi kids were developing accents that followed the path of least resistance. Interestingly enough, the adoption of non-rhotic ways was not nation-wide. While some accents evolved in this regard at varying paces, Southland latched on to rhoticity with a firm grasp. Early twentieth Southland was especially fascinating, as while men were rhotic, women tended to be non-rhotic as if they spoke an entirely different dialect. Historically women have been innovators of the NZ English accent, with this pocket of the country being a striking example of it in action.
As Lynn mentioned, the story of how the New Zealand English accent came to be is a fascinating one due to how quickly it developed. Where some variations of English took hundreds of years to evolve, New Zealand laced its boots up and saw a similar deviation in a much shorter time span. Luckily for linguists interested in it today, the twists and turns of the New Zealand English accent are well-documented as there is a ginormous amount of spoken corpora available in Aotearoa.
