Hard News: Those were different times ...
184 Responses
First ←Older Page 1 2 3 4 5 … 8 Newer→ Last
-
Russell Brown, in reply to
I suspect that Britain’s joining of the EEC was a contributing factor – the cargo cult of Mother England had suddenly turned out to be a mirage, and coincidentally Yankee & Aussie culture was on the ascendancy. It also happened to be the era of Fred Dagg, Pukemanu and later on, Close To Home. Wasn’t the 1970s also the era of the O.E. too?
Yes, maybe we did let ourselves start sound less like Mother England.
I also wonder if white kids sound browner now. There was very, very little Maori and Pacific influence in the cultures we consumed. Even Billy T James would have to wait a few more years to be unleashed on the mainstream,
-
Simon Grigg, in reply to
As Simon will be able to testify, the love affair continues ...
Your grin to I Feel Love at 3am has stayed with me :)
I think you said "Too many wobbly bits in this version though..." or words to that effect
-
Could it be that our memory of how people talked back then is influenced by what we see in old film and TV? That is, people who have been trained to speak in a posh telly voice.
It's no secret that accents always change. My grandma sounded posher than my mum, who sounds posher than me. And our grandchildren, their accents will sound vile to our elderly ears.
-
Russell Brown, in reply to
Could it be that our memory of how people talked back then is influenced by what we see in old film and TV? That is, people who have been trained to speak in a posh telly voice.
Yes, and so ordinary people thought they ought to too when they had a camera pointed at them. Well, that's my strong impression.
I was quite struck that some of the people in the Eyewitness track had accents I'd associate with previous decades.
-
Ah, and so if the television reporter who's interviewing you has a nice posh accent, you'd probably talk like them, deliberately or not.
-
recordari, in reply to
I was too young to punk, but never too young to disco. Donna Summer certainly helped. There was plenty of teenage angsty anarchy around, but my preference from this era was English Ska, The Jam and a couple of bands from Manchester you might have heard of.
One of my first concerts was The Newmatics in coastal New Zealand. An underage rage, if I recall. Not very punk, but great energy in both band and crowd.
-
3410,
Could it be that our memory of how people talked back then is influenced by what we see in old film and TV? That is, people who have been trained to speak in a posh telly voice.
Yes, and so ordinary people thought they ought to too when they had a camera pointed at them. Well, that's my strong impression.
Not buying this theory at all. My grandparents (all Edwardian vintage) etc. spoke with the old Kiwi accent, camera or no.
-
My mum and uncle both had elocution training. It's actually served Mum well as a teacher. Her accent has naturally rolled with the yuf, but she has fantastic voice projection and clarity. It didn't sound like an unusual experience in her circle.
-
I'm surprised nobody's mentioned Lyn of Tawa. She was a work of fiction, but was one of the first to publicly use the real pakeha kiwi accent. It made my mother cringe.
There was a telly programme a couple of years ago about where the NZ accent came from - it had Judy Bailey reading the news as one would have done it a hundred years ago (it sounded more Scots) and how linguists think it will be done in the future. Lyn of Tawa sprang immediately to mind. Apparently the way young women talk is the vanguard of accent change.
A kid I know asked the other day why "blood" isn't pronounced "blued". It's a hell of a question, because there was a huge accent shift in English after spelling started to be standardised - relics show up in words like blood and sword, making kids' spelling lessons harder than they need to be for four hundred years.
-
BenWilson, in reply to
A kid I know asked the other day why "blood" isn't pronounced "blued".
If it came from the German word blut , it probably was pronounced that way once.
-
Chris Waugh, in reply to
A kid I know asked the other day why “blood” isn’t pronounced “blued”. It’s a hell of a question, because there was a huge accent shift in English after spelling started to be standardised – relics show up in words like blood and sword, making kids’ spelling lessons harder than they need to be for four hundred years.
Ah, the Great Vowel Shift., also reponsible for words that were once pronounced somewhat similarly to the modern German words licht and recht being spelt light and right, but with completely unmatching pronunciations in modern English.
-
Russell Brown, in reply to
Not buying this theory at all. My grandparents (all Edwardian vintage) etc. spoke with the old Kiwi accent, camera or no.
I mean the special "broadcasting" voice as opposed to the way people generally spoke, and the two aren't necessarily the same. I hear a underlying accent accent in pre-70s recordings of NZers that seems quite distinct to me. I quite like it.
-
Simon Grigg, in reply to
I hear a underlying accent accent in pre-70s recordings of NZers that seems quite distinct to me. I quite like it.
There was a regionalism too that seems to be more and more subsumed these days - at least to my ears. Trekking around the South Island in the early 1980s you'd find pockets where you had to ask folk to repeat themselves or talk slowly. I'm sure they had the same issues with we northern poseurs.
-
I didn't have elocution lessons, but I did, from quite a young age, go to speech and drama lessons. But then in the 60's and 70's, for kids in my demographic, in Auckland anyway, the extracurricular stuff that happened was limited to: music, ballet, speech and drama, or sport of some kind (in our circles, that was mostly sailing of the P Class variety, sort of thing). The New Zild thing is interesting, isn't it? I can still remember Angela D'Audney reading the news and pronouncing the days of the week "Wednesdee, Thursdee" etc. Very posh.
-
Stephen Judd, in reply to
I know exactly what Russell means. My aunts speak like that still. In fact Winston Peters speaks like that.
I'm working through some of the older films here. NZBC-style narrators predominate, but there are other voices.
-
Russell Brown, in reply to
My mum and uncle both had elocution training. It’s actually served Mum well as a teacher. Her accent has naturally rolled with the yuf, but she has fantastic voice projection and clarity. It didn’t sound like an unusual experience in her circle.
My mum had elocution and, thus, so did I -- although only for the two or three years we lived in Greymouth, oddly enough. That was enough to participate at least once in "competitions". My magnum opus was a talk about tuna fishing -- I had lures to illustrate it.
It has been undeniably useful to me.
-
I had to import my copy of Inflammable Material from Australia because you just couldn't buy it in New Zealand. Cost me $20 from an ad in the back of Rip It Up, back when new albums were only $7.
My punk epiphany came at my 6th Form accrediting party in 1978, when someone had brought Never Mind the Bollocks, Go 2, and Rattus Norvegicus and managed to play a couple of tracks before being shouted off. There was just this tremendous sense of excitement from the music that grabbed me and never let go.
And on the accent thing, my mother speaks very nicely (not Received pronunciation, just very "correctly") - she went to St Cuthberts where they were all taught to speak that way. Our children don't speak kiywiy because we've tried to impress on them the same sorts of clarity of speech as my mother was taught, more because it's a lot easier to get your ideas across if you can speak clearly than because they need to speak "properly".
-
the metallic local twang glossed with the plum that always came out for the cameras.
Methinks the plum was from being well educated middle class kids. Thank the education system I say.
Except for Dicky Driver, hahahaha, he had Neil Roberts fooled. How to exploit being born in the UK to great affect, yeah good one Dick.
Derek King, well I never, had a great flat in Upper Queen St.
And Sheerlux ....fantastic poseurs! And I think Unca Neil had a thing for the guitarist.I watched and thought mmm hypocrisy it spans all generations doesnt it.
Is that the human condition now. Discovering the lies we told when we were young. -
3410,
I mean the special "broadcasting" voice as opposed to the way people generally spoke, and the two aren't necessarily the same. I hear a underlying accent accent in pre-70s recordings of NZers that seems quite distinct to me. I quite like it.
Oh, I see (and agree).
Funnily enough, Damian's Hindsight show has reminded me that such accents were still quite in existence even into the '80s.
-
Sacha, in reply to
where they were all taught to speak that way
A certain ex was proficient at switching on when required that posh voice she learned in school. Instant respect from prospective landlords, for some strange reason. Class lives on.
-
I wonder what influence increasing intermingling with Maori, Pacific and later migrants has had on the UK-dominated Koiwi accent over the last 5 decades? And how much it parallels where the Aussie one has developed? Is there a linguist in the house?
-
3410,
Trekking around the South Island in the early 1980s you'd find pockets where you had to ask folk to repeat themselves or talk slowly.
Indeed. I can remember doing the same in the summer of '94/'95; hitching a ride (Picton to Blenheim or similar) with a guy who asked us if we like "wonn".
"Er... sure." replies us, looking blankly at each other and wondering just what he was on about. It became clear when he suggested that we visit some of the great "wonneries" in the area.
-
Yeah, the accents that are preserved in TV & radio (& music) recordings are a mixture of:
(i) people’s genuine (untutored, unaffected) accents – which were still quite a mixture: bear in mind, in the early 1970s, something over 20% of NZ adults (and a higher proportion of the middle-class NZ adults more often represented in broadcast media) were either born or educated in the UK, and many others had spent some years there on OE;
(ii) interviewees’ approximations to what they identified as a “formal” style associated with broadcast events. There are two things that may have changed over time in this regard.
The first is what (most) NZers identify as an appropriate “formal” spoken style, which, as noted in the “New Zild” documentary mentioned upthread, has shifted from something approximating RP to something more local. (This idea is supported by the results of several studies playing NZers recordings of voices using different accents and asking them to judge the speakers on scales such as sense of humour, friendliness, income, education, and authority. Over the past 30 years the RP accent has lost some ground to a “cultivated NZ” accent on the “perceived power/status” scales.) (A subpoint here, though, is that you can only have a style in your repertoire, and so accurately shift to it, if you have been exposed to it -- and over the past century there has also been some change in the mixture of styles and accents that NZers have had regular exposure to.)
The second is the extent to which style shifting is associated with broadcast events. Such style shifting could be considerably reduced now that TV & radio interviews are more or less taken for granted. (As such, probably we shouldn’t equate 1990s-2000s interviews stylistically with 1960s-70s interviews; and also, we shouldn’t necessarily treat the broadcast recordings as preserving “natural” speech. On the other hand, much of the research into the origins of the NZE accent depends on assuming that the effect of broadcast style on accent is negligible for interviews asking individuals to tell their own personal stories – as a purely practical matter, since that’s the only type of data that’s available.
I’d be interested to hear Jen’s take on this.)(iii) locals’ attempts to emulate desired “foreign” accents, in what Allan Bell calls “referee design” (i.e., trying to sound like a “type” of person recognised by the speaker and their audience. For such language use, the accuracy of the portrayal doesn’t matter as long as the intended referee is recognised). One small-scale research report at VUW compared the pronunciation of /t/ in NZ punk songs with UK punk songs, and noted the variable adoption of glottal pronunciations in the NZ recordings. (Could take me a while to track down the reference; I think it was either in Te Reo or in the Wellington Working Papers , ca. 1990.)
-
I used to have a dub of an NZBC 1960s documentary from the TVNZ Archives on New Zealand country schools that I used to run for people to just watch their dawning reactions. The interviewees were primarily Maori children around 8 to 10 BUT invariabably they were speaking a very crisp BBC English... It was quite startling. And they were also expressing some fairly complex thoughts in grammatically-correct sentences.
There are many influences at work, I figure, in the change since.
Technically, in our egalitarian society, accent matters not a jot, so there is no-one working to 'upskill' either themselves or others, as formerly and evidenced in the comments above involving elocution lessons. British English is also not something that people now would wish to 'upskill' to...
There is also the incredible influence of American television programming - listening to NZ adolescents now, it is definitely more American Standard accent. In 2008 had to spend some research time chatting to around 50 teenagers on the phone to find talent for a music doco, and the change was extremely obvious. I was always having to suppress the desire to ask them if they were of US heritage.
Personally, I'm fascinated by the rhythms of speech. Speaking generally, the Maori and Pacific lilt has really sung its way into our speech as a nation. Our contemporary NZE is infinitely more Polynesian than ever before in its lilt and beats.
-
Stephen Judd, in reply to
The interviewees were primarily Maori children around 8 to 10 BUT invariabably they were speaking a very crisp BBC English
Were those kids from Maori-speaking homes, I wonder? I expect that if you were taught English as a second language in the earlier parts of the 20th century in NZ, you were given solid RP models to base your speech on.
Post your response…
This topic is closed.