Background

Although speakers of northern hemisphere varieties of English perceive few, if any, differences between New Zealand English (NZE) and that of Australia (Wells 1982: 605; Trudgill and Hannah 1985: 18), New Zealanders have been aware of differences in their own speech for at least a century (Gordon 1983a, 1983b). All Kiwis share the stereotypes of the broad-accented cow cocky and the refined university professor. However, the notion that accent varies according to socioeconomic ‘class’ distinctions stands in direct conflict with the cherished belief that New Zealand is a ‘classless’ society, at least in theory (Sinclair 1980: 316–17; Ausubel 1960: 27ff). The economic difficulties of the years after 1973 have weakened the myth, but its influence may have contributed to a lack of interest in sociolinguistic variation in NZE.

A second factor which impressed me as an American immigrant to New Zealand in 1970 was an apparent feeling of inferiority about the NZE accent (cf. Bayard 1990a) – a belief that it was little more than a colonial, non-standard variety of RP. When I began this study in 1984, very little quantitative research into NZE sociolinguistics had been done. The phonetic research which had been carried out relied on ‘general NZE’ speakers (Hawkins 1973a, 1973b; Maclagan 1982), only roughly defined along the lines of Mitchell and Delbridge's (1965) ‘broad-general-culti-vated’ trichotomy in Australia (see Guy, this volume).