This book is a description of English as it is spoken in New Zealand. New Zealand English (NZE) is one of the youngest native-speaker varieties of English, and is the only variety of English where there is recorded evidence of its entire history. It shares some features with other Southern Hemisphere varieties of English such as Australian English and South African English, but is also clearly distinct from these. For the past two decades, extensive research has focused on the evolution and ongoing development of the variety. The book presents the results of this research in an accessible way. ... More

This book is a description of English as it is spoken in New Zealand. New Zealand English (NZE) is one of the youngest native-speaker varieties of English, and is the only variety of English where there is recorded evidence of its entire history. It shares some features with other Southern Hemisphere varieties of English such as Australian English and South African English, but is also clearly distinct from these. For the past two decades, extensive research has focused on the evolution and ongoing development of the variety. The book presents the results of this research in an accessible way. It includes: an account of the phonetic, phonological, morphosyntactic, lexical, and discourse features that are characteristic of the dialect; a discussion of the historical development of NZE; a description of the current social and regional variation within the variety; an indication of the areas where change is currently occurring; and sample texts and an annotated bibliography of relevant literature. There are also several associated audio files, which provide examples of many of the phenomena discussed, at http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/dialects/.