"Anyway, we're not British": a social dialect study of two features of the speech of thirty Pakeha women from Wanganui

Abstract

This social dialect survey was designed to increase the available information on NZE by collecting data on the speech of thirty Pakeha women from Wanganui. Both interviews and questionnaires were used to investigate their speech and two specific linguistic features were examined in some detail. The first of these was a phonological variable and involved examination of the realisation of /t/ in intervocalic position. Extracts from the 'conversation' section of each interview were transcribed and 100 tokens of intervocalic /t/ identified in each. These were analysed, with the results showing that the use of a voiced variant for /t/ in this position is fairly widespread in the speech of younger informants. It is also associated more with tokens involving a short preceding vowel and tokens that occurred word finally. As well as the voiced and voiceless variants, two other variants were also observed in the data. They only accounted for a small percentage of the tokens, but were, once again, associated with the speech of the women in the youngest age group. The second feature considered was lexical and involved investigation of the extent of shift from British to American terms. The informants' perceptions of and attitudes towards American terms were also explored. The results suggested that American terms which are used are frequently not identified as American by the people using them and that those that are, are not used. This observation is consistent with Meyerhoff's (1993) hypothesis that certain terms are avoided because they are perceived as belonging to an out-group. Various other factors were also found to be relevant for certain terms, however, such as the semantic differences that some informants perceived between terms. Overall, the results showed that not much shift has occurred.