Gems of Kiwispeak ‘national treasures’

Press, 1 June 1989, Page 18

Gems of Kiwispeak ‘national treasures’

NZPA Wellington “Whaddaya reckon?” “Gidday,” and other gems of Kiwispeak are not cultural cringe material — rather they are national treasures which a society of linguists wants to collect and store on a national database of New Zealand English. The idea for “Accent, A Computerised Corpus of English in New Zealand Today,” arose at a national conference of the Linguistics Society in Auckland.

The society’s president and Auckland University applied linguist, Ms Jackie Greenwood, says the organisation wants to collect samples of spoken and written New Zealand English from a wide range of

situations and sources. These include dialogue from conversation between colleagues, friends, shop assistant and customer, parent and child, employer and employee and husband and wife, as well as telephone conversations. They also want samples of the language used in broadcasting, courts, Parliamentary debates, advertising, print media, committee meetings, sporting events, State occasions, churches, and classrooms.

The samples will be stored on a computer based at Canterbury University’s English department. ’Ms Greenwood likened the database to other national archives, such as

museums and libraries. New Zealanders were often critical of their countrymen’s speech patterns, she said, and complain of talking through the nose, not opening the mouth to pronounce properly, and general laziness. But these were perfectly normal features of speech and people should be proud and accept them as uniquely Kiwi, she said. “It’s just different. A person still has to make some effort to pronounce New Zealand English as with any other English." The society wants to collect samples '.hat represent English as it is spoken today and hop« to have the project completed in the next 10 years.