Part 2. Learn some specific New Zealand words. Your local dairy does not just sell milk! You can get bread, snacks, newspapers, and groceries from the dairy. Bach: holiday home, often coastal. Chilli Bin: cooler. Jandals: flip flops or thong footwear. Manchester: bed linen. Lollies: sweets or candies. Shonky — mild profanity. These are words and phrases in New Zealand English that sound similar to phrases in British or American English, but actually have contradictory meanings.
Quite nice: something that is unpleasant. To have a mare: to make a fool of yourself. Sweet As: agreed, or good. This phrase is occasionally confused by non-Kiwis as being a compliment to the bottom.
Yeah-nah: No thank you. Prepare for abbreviated versions of common words. New Zealand English speakers are notorious for abbreviating words. Part 3. Recognize the roots of the Maori language. Maori is the language of the indigenous people of New Zealand. Although the Maori language was banned for many years after New Zealand was colonized, today it is spoken commonly in certain communities. In fact, as many as 1, Maori vocabulary terms are now commonly integrated into English-language speech.
Learn a few key Maori words. As Maori is largely integrated into everyday usage, it is advisable to learn at least a few key words. In addition, many Maori geographical and city names are used by speakers of New Zealand English. Learn the Maori vowels and their pronunciation.
In Maori, most consonants are pronounced the same as in English. Andrea Thompson New Zealand Resident. Coming from the US? Kiwis typically speak quickly and abbreviate words or add "y" to words. Having been to the US and heard the different accents, it's hard to say any particular word is pronounced one way in NZ as opposed to any other way in the US.
You might need your gumboots , too. This list of 30 essential slang words is just the starting point in your learning Kiwi slang journey. An excellent resource for learning more is the New Zealand Slang website , which is solely dedicated to sharing Kiwi slang words and their meanings.
For people planning on moving to New Zealand for study or those who want to understand better the local language and culture, the NauMai NZ website has a great page about the local culture and lifestyle. FluentU takes real-world videos—like music videos, movie trailers, news and inspiring talks—and turns them into personalized language learning lessons.
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FluentU helps you learn fast with useful questions and multiple examples. Learn more. The best part? An Bay of Plenty Times column branded the accent a loathsome disease. Ight elevens are ighty ight! While it appears outrage at the accent reached critical mass around the turn of the 20th century, New Zealand English was brewing even earlier. It turns out that in the early s, a bunch of traveller broadcasters travelled by van from town to town getting elderly people to speak on tape.
What they found showed the twang was fermenting long before the moaning started. They spoke to Mr Malcom Ritchie. He was born in Dunedin in and his parents were from Scotland. But Malcolm spoke mostly like a south-western Englishman, the linguists explain, with elements of Scottish, Irish and Cornish.
They spoke to Annie Hamilton. She was born in Arrowtown in Her parents were Irish. Her accent sounded a lot like New Zealanders sound today. So what happened? Well, according to census data from , about half the early settlers were English, about a quarter were Irish, about a quarter were Scots and 5 per cent were Australian.
Around , changes in the educational system meant the number of children attending school skyrocketed. These schools appear to have been the perfect stewing pot for an amalgamation of accents. Kids began to speak like each other, not their parents. They appear to have created New Zealand English in an extraordinarily short time frame.
The new accent appears to have appeared first in towns with more diverse populations, with some places holding on to distinctive accents where everyone was Scottish, for example a little longer. This is how New Zealand English outlines two studies on regional accents. This illustrates a problem, the authors wrote. People know regions have unique characteristics, so they assume they have unique speech.
And quite nice is generally used to refer to something that is the complete opposite. As is used ubiquitously to exaggerate any preceding adjective, like hungry as very hungry and beached as well and truly stuck or in difficult circumstances. The aye? Piss refers to alcoholic beverages generally beer. To sink piss is to drink beer.
Take sheep for example. Although sheep numbers are declining, the old saying that they outnumber people remains true. The way that Kiwis flatten vowels into an unrecognisable monotone is all to do with phonemes, those perceptually distinct units of sound that make up a language. However, since the millennium, there are only 19 phonemes evident in spoken NZE.
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