New Zealand English (review)

Judging by the titles of the other volumes published in the series Varieties of English around the world, New Zealand seems to be one of the most interesting areas for linguistic research at the moment, with two publications in the last years (Marianne Hundt’s New Zealand English grammar—fact or fiction? Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1998 and the present volume).

In the first of thirteen chapters, the editors give a brief overview of the history of English in New Zealand, followed by a more detailed discussion of the history of New Zealand English (NZE; Koenraad Kuiper and Allan Bell, 11–22). The authors emphasize the differences of NZE in comparison with other (New World) Englishes. As far as the present-day research situation is concerned, the report on the state-of-the-art in NZE shows that little is being done on grammar or regional variation—yet. Phonological and sociological topics clearly dominate the field. With the growing amount of corpus data available on the variety, new areas will hopefully be added to the fields of analysis in the future.

The majority of papers fall under the following areas of research: (1) phonology of NZE (including attitudes towards accents; internal and external comparisons) (W. Scott Allan and Donna Starks, 53–83; Nicola Woods, 84–110; Margaret Batterham, 111–45; and Donn Bayard, 297–324); (2) morphosyntax of NZE (primarily in comparison with standard BrE) (Heidi Quinn, 173–97 and David Britain, 198–220); (3) NZE lexis (usually only in terms of origins of the NZ lexicon and its present-day relations with other varieties, both standard and nonstandard) (Tony Deverson, 23–39 and Laurie Bauer, 40–52); (4) Maori vs. Pakeha English? (Allan Bell, 221–48; Maria Stubbe and Janet Holmes, 249–78); (5) pragmatic/discourse devices of NZE (Paul Warren and David Britain, 146–72).

It is usual for authors to address more than one of these areas. In the present volume, Bell discusses a number of features from different areas with regard to their realizations in the speech of Maori and Pakeha speakers. Warren and Britain and Stubbe and Holmes are concerned with the differences in the communicative behavior of those two speech communities and with the problems this may cause, and Britain analyzes variation in morphosyntax between Maori and Pakeha speakers.

Let me try to summarize the major findings from those five areas as presented in the articles: Although their historical links certainly have to be acknowledged (cf. e.g. Bauer), NZE and Australian English are not as similar as one might believe (cf. e.g. Allan and Starks, Bayard). Even though Maori English has been described as ‘elusive’ (Bell, 222), recent research has been able to list a number of features that seem to be candidates for transfer from Maori (in particular discourse features, but also phonological features; cf. Bell, Warren and Britain, Stubbe and Holmes).

All in all, the present volume offers a good overview of the type of research that has been done on NZE in the recent past. A big plus as usual with these volumes is the bibliography, comprising about 450 titles—the reader interested in whatever aspect of NZE will certainly be able to find relevant references there.