OZ - feesh & cheeps, Seednee
NZ - fush & chups, Sudney.
I have been giving much thought to our accents of late. The NZ accent is becoming ever more clearly different from its OZ counterpart. A popular music group here at the moment has a lead singer who sings with a pronounced Zildian accent, and it is much less similar to the mutant aberration spawned on the penal side of the Tasman than used to be the case. Also, the recent netball champs have given an example of how environment can affect the speed at which one's accent changes. The star shooter for the NZ team is Irene van Dyk, who moved here from the RSA just 5 years ago. She is a teacher, so she has a great deal of exposure to Kiwi accents, and already her own accent is more Kiwi than Seth Effrican. As the number of children learning Maaori continues to grow, it will be interesting to see what effect that language, with its insistence on clear, non-diphthongal vowel sounds, will have on the evolution of the sweet sound that is Zild.
