The flat New Zealand vowel that turns “fish and chips” into “fush and chups” may have first taken shape on Auckland streets rather than in the small Otago and Canterbury towns where most accent research has focused. That is the working hypothesis behind a new round of oral history analysis at the University of Auckland, prompted in part by a 1921 thesis that sat almost forgotten in a Dunedin archive for a hundred years.
The thesis was the work of George Edward Thompson, a professor at Otago University, who in 1921 produced one of the earliest detailed written descriptions of how early New Zealanders actually sounded. His manuscript ended up in the Hocken Collections in Dunedin and stayed largely uncited for decades, until a member of the current Auckland research team came across it in 2022. Thompson noted at the time that the new accent appeared to be developing fastest in the North Island, and most clearly of all in Auckland.
Speaking at a public talk in Auckland this week, the researchers said Thompson’s observation matches what Auckland’s nineteenth-century demographic history would predict. Many of New Zealand’s other early centres were dominated by settlers from a single part of Britain. Christchurch drew heavily on Anglican English migration, Dunedin on Scottish Presbyterian families, and pockets of the South Island had strong Irish and northern English communities. Auckland, by contrast, took in people from all of those regions at once, and kept growing steadily through the late 1800s rather than going through the boom and bust cycles that hit the gold towns and the wheat belts. Linguists generally agree that mixed, growing populations are the kind of environment in which a new accent emerges fastest, because children level out the regional features they hear from the adults around them.
The project is built around oral history recordings held by Auckland Libraries, which capture the voices of Aucklanders born around the turn of the twentieth century. The library’s sound archive contains hundreds of these interviews, recorded across the late twentieth century with people whose own childhood accents were formed in the 1890s and 1900s. By comparing those recordings with modern Auckland speakers, the team can track how individual vowels have shifted from one generation to the next.
The voices on those tapes sit somewhere between modern New Zealand English and the British and Australian accents that surrounded the country at the time. Many of the early speakers move between pronunciations within the same sentence, a sign that the local accent had not yet hardened into the form we recognise today. But the famous markers are mostly there already, including the centralised i sound that overseas listeners hear in “fish”, and the merging of vowels that makes “here” and “hair” sound almost identical to a modern Kiwi ear.
One of the wider questions the project hopes to answer is why New Zealand English ended up with so little regional variation. Most countries of comparable size have several clearly distinct accents, but New Zealand has only one strong regional outlier, the rolled R of older Southland speakers, which traces back to Scottish settlement. If Auckland was indeed the engine room of the new accent, that flatness across the country starts to make more sense. A dominant urban accent radiating outward through trade, schooling and later through radio and television would tend to iron out smaller regional differences before they had a chance to settle.
The Auckland angle also reopens a question that earlier studies tended to set aside. Previous research, much of it based on South Island recordings, treated the similarities between New Zealand and Australian English as a coincidence, and concluded that Māori speech had only a marginal effect on Pākehā vowels. Both of those conclusions look less safe once Auckland is placed at the centre of the story. From its founding in 1840, Auckland traded constantly with Sydney and the Australian colonies, and its early Pākehā population lived in much closer day-to-day contact with Māori communities than settlers in Canterbury or Otago. If the accent first jelled in that environment, both Australian English and te reo Māori may have left a heavier fingerprint on the way New Zealanders speak than the standard textbooks suggest.
Modern Auckland appears to still be doing the same job. Younger Aucklanders are largely keeping the classic short vowels that mark them out overseas, but they are also softening some of the older mergers in a way that researchers think is partly driven by the city’s linguistic mix. Around 40 percent of Aucklanders were born outside New Zealand, and many young speakers grow up hearing several varieties of English in the playground every day. The accent that comes out the other end is recognisably Kiwi, but with cleaner vowel distinctions in words like “seven” and “eggs”, which can otherwise trip up listeners who learned English elsewhere.
The team has not yet published the technical acoustic analysis that would settle Thompson’s claim one way or the other. That work involves measuring the precise frequencies of vowels in the historical recordings and comparing them with samples from speakers born in different decades and different parts of the country. But the early signs from the Auckland Libraries tapes are, the researchers say, consistent with the idea that the city was already setting the accent before the First World War.
If they are right, the implications go beyond linguistics. The story of how New Zealanders started to sound like New Zealanders has often been told as a South Island story, growing out of the planned settlements of Canterbury and Otago. Putting Auckland back at the centre of it changes the cast of characters, and brings Māori and trans-Tasman influences squarely into the picture. Background detail on the wider project, including the rediscovery of Thompson’s thesis, was published this week by RNZ.
Where do you sit on the Auckland question. Does the accent you grew up with sound closest to your parents, your grandparents, or to the people you went to school with. Tell us in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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