H‐droppin’: Two sociolinguistic variables in New Zealand English¹

We gratefully acknowledge the funding support of the Social Sciences Committee of the New Zealand Foundation for Research, Science and Technology, the (now defunct) University Grants Committee, and Victoria University's Internal Research Grants Committee. We express our appreciation to the people of Porirua who enabled this project to happen, particularly those who let themselves be interviewed, and Mr Ihakara Arthur for his advice and assistance. We owe a debt to Mary Boyce, our colleague in collecting the data and acting as our passport to the local community. We would like to thank our skilled interviewers ‐ Rachel Fogarty, Boyd Ellison, Hugh O'Donnell, Marlene Wilkinson and Jenny Jacob. Also our patient and accurate transcribers and data entry people ‐ Miriam Meyerhoff, Heather Gatley, Mary Sewell, Sue Petris and Shelley Robertson. We thank Jenny Neale for critique of our interview schedule, Barbara Horvath for her guidance on working with the Varbrul programme, and Mike Bennett for frequent miscellaneous computer advice. Thanks to Peter Trudgill, Barbara Horvath and Donn Bayard for their comments on the project report (Holmes, Bell & Boyce 1991) in which this paper began. And thankyou to two Australian Journal of Linguistics reviewers for suggestions which have improved the final product.

Abstract

The paper reports findings from the first large‐scale sociolinguistic investigation of conversational New Zealand English. We examine two sociolinguistic variables from interviews with 75 mainly working‐class speakers and compare them with other dialects of English. Our findings challenge the view that NZE has little or no dropping of word‐initial /h/. We found a modest mean level of HDROP among our speakers ‐ much less than found in Britain, but slightly more than in Australia. HDROP exceeded 30 percent among some groups, and 70 percent for a few individual speakers. Men used much more HDROP than women. HDROP was favoured particularly by older and middle‐aged Maori speakers, and avoided by older Pakeha [European] women. The variable ING, which realizes the velar nasal in [i?] as the alveolar [n], is as stable a sociolinguistic marker in NZE as elsewhere. Men reduced twice as many ING tokens as women, and there was some differentiation by socioeconomic group. The level of ING is lower than in British and American English, but similar to Australian English. The linguistic factors which influence the frequency of both HDROP and ING operate similarly in NZE to other varieties.

Notes

We gratefully acknowledge the funding support of the Social Sciences Committee of the New Zealand Foundation for Research, Science and Technology, the (now defunct) University Grants Committee, and Victoria University's Internal Research Grants Committee. We express our appreciation to the people of Porirua who enabled this project to happen, particularly those who let themselves be interviewed, and Mr Ihakara Arthur for his advice and assistance. We owe a debt to Mary Boyce, our colleague in collecting the data and acting as our passport to the local community. We would like to thank our skilled interviewers ‐ Rachel Fogarty, Boyd Ellison, Hugh O'Donnell, Marlene Wilkinson and Jenny Jacob. Also our patient and accurate transcribers and data entry people ‐ Miriam Meyerhoff, Heather Gatley, Mary Sewell, Sue Petris and Shelley Robertson. We thank Jenny Neale for critique of our interview schedule, Barbara Horvath for her guidance on working with the Varbrul programme, and Mike Bennett for frequent miscellaneous computer advice. Thanks to Peter Trudgill, Barbara Horvath and Donn Bayard for their comments on the project report (Holmes, Bell & Boyce 1991) in which this paper began. And thankyou to two Australian Journal of Linguistics reviewers for suggestions which have improved the final product.