Mōrena, I haven’t done a thread in ages, but was asked to do one on New Zealand-English so here goes First up,from here on in I’ll be calling it Aotearoa-English, Aotearoa (meaning long white cloud) being the name of the country in its Indigneous language Te Reo Māori ...

We could do a massive thread on Aotearoa-English & its features, but I’m going to stick to a few distinctive ones. I think we’ll start with some vowels The graph in the next tweet is the vowel chart of the IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet)...

The symbols all represent vowel sounds You’ll notice some vowels are labelled front or back etc, this means that the tongue is at the front or back of the mouth when making that sound ...

You’ll also see that some are called open or closed vowels, and that refers to if the tongue is low or high in the mouth when making the sound In Aotearoa-English some front vowels are raised which really means that people say them with the tongue higher in the mouth ...

You can see is this literal “raising” on the chart;
- æ raises to ε
- ε raises to ɪ
ε is higher than æ, and ɪ is higher than ε. This is why to me, “men” sounds like “min” in an Aotearoa-English accent Staying with the chart for now, let’s look at probably the most famous...

thing about Aotearoa vowels The front vowel sound ɪ has centralised. Exactly as it sounds, the vowel ɪ has changed to the more central vowel sound ə, which is the reason that “fish & chips” famously becomes “fush & “chups” (I love this part of the accent btw )...

Another interesting sound-y thing that has happened in Aotearoa-English is the CHEER-CHAIR merger Which just means that the vowels used in those (& similar words) are no longer distinct & sound veryyyy similar, both smushing into the CHEER sound, same goes for ear & air...

Aotearoa-English is also (mostly) non-rhotic. All that means is that if an “r” comes after a vowel, then it’s not pronounced as a distinct sound, e.g in car Rhoticity was actually widespread in English (e.g. in Shakespeare’s time) but has since been lost in some Englishes...

like RP & Aotearoa English. Other Englishes held on the their “r”s, like Irish-English & most American-Englishes Finally, another super lovely & very distinctive feature of Aotearoa-English (IMO ) is using “eh” as an utterance final particle...

For instance, something like “That was an awesome trip, eh?” I remember very clearly the first time I heard it being used & I was amazed Ok that’s all for now. I’ll attach this to my thread of threads where you can read my previous language threads and...

A wee disclaimer: I’m a syntactician so apologies in advance to all phonologists/phoneticians out for this very simplified take (and any glaring errors) Mā te Wā ~ Byeee