Elizabeth Gordon, Lyle Campbell, Jennifer Hay, Margaret Maclagan, Andrea Sudbury & Peter Trudgill, New Zealand English: Its history and evolution

Extract

Elizabeth Gordon, Lyle Campbell, Jennifer Hay, Margaret Maclagan, Andrea Sudbury & Peter Trudgill, New Zealand English: Its history and evolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Pp. xix, 370. Hb $85.00.

Between 1946 and 1948, Radio New Zealand established a Mobile Unit that visited many towns throughout the country, seeking out people who were longtime residents of small towns in order to record their oral histories. In 1986 Elizabeth Gordon was told of these archived recordings. The uniqueness of this data corpus is that the speakers, born between 1851 and 1904, were all participants in the formation of a new dialect, New Zealand English (NZE). It is unlikely that other data sets will be found in which tape recording technology and a first generation of speakers come together. English had arrived in 1840 with the original colonizers, who were mainly English, Scottish, and Irish. The story gets complicated by the arrival of many English-speaking immigrants from Australia, descendants from a penal colony founded in 1788, which had formed its own new dialect earlier with input from English, Scottish, and Irish settlers. Moreover, settlers often spent time first in Australia and then moved to New Zealand, and there was considerable contact between Australia and New Zealand from the start. It is within this historical setting and with this database that the Origins of New Zealand English (ONZE) project researchers set out to describe early NZE in order to examine its origins.