Southlanders’ R a puzzlement
For Southlanders, the letter R has long been something to savour. But now it’s presenting a fresh research challenge for linguists. Michael Fallow investigates.
Amajor study into the Southland accent produced a startling finding – one with implications for linguists worldwide, and for our understanding of early southern society.
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Said it before and we’ll say it again. Some people don’t know their Rs from their elbow.
Against a background of distant hurrumphing a half-million-dollar study of the Southland accent was announced in 2016.
All that money, critics said, just to discover what? A bleeding obvious remnant of the deep south’s Scottish forebears?
That’s not what it was about, and certainly not what emerged.
Yes, Southland does have a strong Scottish heritage and yes, Scots roll their Rs.
But that pleasantly trilled sound isn’t what Southlanders make.
Long before the study began, linguists were explaining to anyone who listened that the distinctive R found, patchily nowadays, in the south is something more correctly called rhoticity.
Any Southlander so speaking is just sounding the letter in places where most New Zealanders let it go a bit AWOL – not at the start of words, but directly after a vowel, in words like nurse or cart.
And it’s why northerners delight in asking us to repeat phrases like ‘‘dirty purple work shirt’’.
It’s often said to be the only regional accent in New Zealand, but it hadn’t been closely scrutinised using modern techniques, until the study through the University of Canterbury, and financed by the Marsden Fund, was commissioned.
As part of their labours, they pored into more than 300 voice recordings taken from Southlanders from the 19th century to the early 1990s.
It started out as a simple attempt to better understand the full trajectory of the accent’s development; in the expectation it would sync up with wellestablished patterns worldwide.
As the study leader Lynn Clark concludes, they couldn’t merge the findings with the statistical models. Instead, ‘‘we uncovered something far more interesting’’.
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Sex. More specifically, gender. Women and men in early 20th century Southland had radically different things going on, Clark says.
Southland’s women tended to have more pronounced rhoticity.
‘‘This isn’t supposed to happen,’’ Clark says.
To have different dialects in different areas is one thing. But to have variations within the households between the menfolk and the womenfolk had been unheard of.
‘‘No-one had ever found anything like this in linguistics.’’
In more recent times, the difference between genders has levelled out, but its very existence in the first place raises a question: was this somehow unique to early 20th century Southland?
It’s often agreeable to be a bit special, but Clark suspects the implications are wider.
‘‘We think that Southland isn’t too different from other parts of the world and so it’s unlikely that this gender division is only ever found there.’’
Why might it be so long unrecognised?
‘‘No-one has ever looked for it before.’’
So now the Canterbury project linguists hope their research will spark others to look for this in their own data – ‘‘and let us know what they find’’.
What might this longstanding gender variation say about our society at the time?
The study adjusted focus to explore more about the division of gender – and labour – back then.
What they found was that well into the 20th century – in fact, until probably the 1980s – Southland had a fairly gender-segregated society.
Obviously, men and women lived together and raised children together. But they often didn’t work in the same places and spaces.
It was also still common for women to leave the workforce after marriage in Southland, up until the 1980s.
‘‘If we talk like the people who we spend most time with,’’ says Clark, ‘‘men were spending more time with men and women were spending more time with women.
‘‘Again, we don’t think this was unique to Southland, although it’s possible that the gender division may have remained a little longer than in the urban centres.’’ News of the gender divide was swiftly met by a theory in Gore – perhaps it reflects that, traditionally, women may have been the more ardent talkers. As one Gore mother puts it, women are more talkative among themselves – an inclusive approach to make sure everyone feels comfortable.
Whereas: ‘‘Men are just comfortable standing around together and they hardly say a word.’’
Well, it’s a theory. People who try to mimic the Southland accent tend to hammer Rs in the wrong place – like the start of a word, rather than after a nice flavoursome vowel. Even the endearing performance from Oscar-winning Anthony Hopkins, playing the famous Southland motorbike speedster Burt Munro in The World’s Fastest Indian, gave a perhaps worthy, but not spot-on, rendition.
Having pored over Munro’s heroic Southland accent in recorded footage, Hopkins said in interviews afterwards that it sounded to him more Irish and Cornish. Learning it wasn’t as tough as he’d expected, with New Zealand actors and director Roger Donaldson (an Aussie but with an educated ear for Kiwi lingo) to keep him on track.
It seems Hopkins wasn’t fixating over exquisite perfection, in case it invited distracting scrutiny of actorly technique.
He told Jay Leno on The Tonight Show: ‘‘The thing is not to make it too accurate, otherwise it becomes like a false nose.’’
There’s nothing false nosey about the accents that issue from Gore’s CaveFM radio. Its boss Robert (Caveman) McKenzie’s onair sound owes more to his upbringing and earlier work as a builder and Mataura meatworker than to the radio training he never had.
But his accent brings in extra voicing ads – for the simple reason that he sounds local.
McKenzie knows it’s not just Scottishness underpinning his accent, though his own lineage reaches back thataways. He and some mates do a Saturday morning show, Grumpy Old Men, and the timing is such that some friends in Scotland, in the midst of their own convivial Friday night libations, occasionally get in touch.
‘‘When they’re drunk,’’ McKenzie acknowledges, ‘‘they’re very hard to understand.’’
As for any residual gender divide in Southland, he couldn’t help but notice that young males tend to be a tad monosyllabic when they’re in the studio.
‘‘Young teenage girls, though, you can’t shut them up.’’
You’ll be hard pressed to find a Southlander who professes to feel embarrassed about their accent, though it waxes and wanes throughout the south, stronger in some contexts than others.
A stroll around Gore confirms as much.
At Advance Agriculture, Callum Dickson and Paul Sinclair, alongside passing pedestrians Pete Knowler, of Tuatapere, and Lesley McGregor, of Waikaia, all have slightly varying strengths of accent, but each independently feels the same way about it.
They’re comfortable with it. It speaks to their identity.
Knowler cuts easily through the complexities. ‘‘We’re Southlanders,’’ he says.
McGregor says she gets identified in Australia, but they only seem to hear her as a Kiwi. It takes expat New Zealanders to trace her back to Southland.
And as for any variations within her own family, she’s quick to conclude that her brother-in-law stands out as a prime example of a fully functioning Southland accent.
Dickson’s aware that some southerners actively try to lose the accent when they move away. He didn’t feel that way – ‘‘I’m personally quite proud of it’’ – but he did notice that on his return from overseas, his speech, which had slowed down, sped up once again to what seems to be the Kiwi norm, as if to get to the end of each sentence as quickly as possible.
Back in Southland, Rs revived somewhat, and some Kiwi slang emerged from its slumbers too.
Meanwhile, something akin to the Southland R is gaining strength further north. But that’s hardly because travelling Southlanders are successfully evangelising on its behalf.
Nor can it be put down simply to pervasive American influences, Clark says, ‘‘otherwise we’d be seeing it across the country and across the world’’.
The Auckland Voices Project provides the insights here. It’s a study of how extraordinary levels of migration, adding to very stable ethnic majorities have changed not just the face of Auckland, but the way it sounds.
The researchers involved think it may have more to do with the large influx of people in Auckland who speak English as a second language.
From other studies of major urban areas such as London and Paris, it’s become clear that when you get lots of second-language speakers of English living in a new place, it changes the local accent.
What, then, is the future for the southern R? Are the forces of change resistible or in any way governable? If Southlanders – or pockets of us, where the accent is stronger – determine we really like and want to preserve it, how much would a collective act of will matter?
A good question, hard to answer, Clark says.
It’s often the case that an accent feature can take on social meaning – it starts to become a marker of some social characteristic to speakers in that community.
The tricky part is knowing how much of the variation is attributable to free will. It’s likely that it’s a contributing factor, but not the only factor governing variation in natural speech.
Data in the Southland study offers hints. It includes interviews with younger speakers in Southland who use more R when they are talking about things to do with Southland – for example, the placename Gore – and that’s especially the case if they feel positively about the place.
But the reverse is also true, with younger speakers who don’t feel so positively about Southland – say they aim to move away – using less of the R sound.
‘‘I doubt very much, if any, of this is within their conscious control,’’ says Clark, ‘‘so that’s why it’s especially difficult to pin down.