An Acoustic Analysis of New Zealand English Vowels in Auckland

Abstract

This study presents an acoustic analysis looking at phonetic diversity in Auckland. New Zealand English is often characterized by a lack of regional variation; however, this claim has been made without considering Auckland, New Zealand’s largest city. Over the last 30 years there has been increased migration to New Zealand, specifically to Auckland. In 35% of Auckland’s suburbs, no ethnic group represents more than 50% of the population. In addition, many speakers were born overseas, and many more have grown up using different varieties of English as the spoken norm. In this study, 40 New Zealand English speakers from three suburbs in Auckland (Mt. Roskill n= 14, Papatoetoe, n=13, Titirangi, n=13) were recorded. For our young group (n=33) the participants were aged between 18 and 25 years, and each suburb was evenly split between male and female participants. Speakers were either New Zealand born or arrived in the country under the age of seven. Our older group (n=7) were female speakers, all New Zealand born, and aged between 40 and 70 yrs. Vowels which had sentence stress were identified and extracted, and formant values were calculated at the vowel target. All formant tracks were hand checked. Over 8000 monophthong tokens and 4000 diphthongs were analysed in this study. Whilst no differences were found between young speakers from different suburbs, there were age effects. Further, speech from the young Auckland speakers was noticeably different to findings from other studies on New Zealand English. Most notably monophthongs TRAP and DRESS were lower than expected. In addition the first targets of the diphthongs FACE and GOAT have risen, and PRICE has fronted, for younger speakers from all suburbs. The thesis concludes discussing the implications of the results.