The Kiwi accent always sounds like they
are asking a question, their voice goes up at the end of a sentence,
particularly young ladies do that. But this caused heaps of confusion
or irritation to me when I arrived here first.
One more annoying thing is the
pronunciation between "i" and "e" is not distinguishable at all in some
words. I had a really hard time understanding Kiwi girl at a shop long
time ago when she asked me" Do you have a pen or do you need a pen". I
really could not work out why she wouldn't just give me a pen as per
normal. In fact, she was saying" Do you have a PIN (personal identification number) or do you need a pen"
as you can pay on credit card with pin in New Zealand. Red and
read, six and sex, share and sheer, many examples go on and on ..
Now I would go along with Kiwi accent well, and I think it is a familiarity thing.
Actually I am pretty much indifferent to
Kiwi and Aussie accents, the American English or British English as I
just hear them too often for them to be interesting any more.
However, to my surprise, Kiwi accent
rated as the most attractive and prestigious form of English outside UK
in a BBC survey? To be honest, it is a wee bit ironical as Kiwis are
often negative about their own accent and prefer British accent. I
believe the term "attractive" could be replaced with "weird" on this
count. Yeah right.
