Our dialect – another view

Michael Fallow wrote a very interesting article (Southlanders’ R a puzzlement,

July 23) about the dialect of English spoken in Murihiku/Southland. It focused on the findings of Canterbury University linguistics researcher Lynn Clark.

Another linguistics researcher, the late Donn Bayard of Otago University, also studied and published extensive results on the dialect of English spoken in our country. He pointed out that the only regional dialect of NZE (New Zealand English) is found in our province, and gave reasons why the R sound is a feature of it.

However, I disagree with Lynn Clark that the women’s variety of our dialect, with a more pronounced rhoticity, is a unique linguistic feature. Some other languages, for example Japanese, also have a women’s way of speaking that is distinct from the main language.

Another feature of the Murihiku/ Southland dialect is that it contains words that are not understood by other speakers of NZE. These words are now used less by younger speakers. Some were derived from Kai Tahu Mā ori in the 1800s when migrants first came here and encountered takata whenua and their language.

Some examples are: cockabully, or small fish (kokopu); claddy or kraddy, meaning flax-stalk (korari); and bullibull, a weedy shrub with purple flowers and orange berries (poroporo).

Other examples in our dialect not understood in NZE are derived from other languages – such as crib, sulky (pram) and cow-byre (cow shed).

Few New Zealanders are aware they speak a dialect of English. An example of this was earlier in the year when our PM was in a video at her meeting with the US president. The president had no idea what a chilly bin was or even what the Australian version, esky, meant.

My opinion of a reason Helen Clark did not get the top job in the United Nations was that her UN colleagues simply could not understand a lot of her strong NZE dialect filled with the colloquialisms that any New Zealand farmer fluently uses. Carl Stapleton,

Invercargill