I'll just have me fush and chups and then I'm off to bid

Fact: A kiwi fruit is actually a Chinese Gooseberry, just renamed after a successful marketing campaign during the Cold War era.

After stumbling across a recent New Zealand Herald article online about our accents lately, I thought it was about time I discussed the issues I’ve had with being a New Zealander and my accent while abroad. Firstly, there has only ever been one time in the year I’ve been away that someone has asked if I was a New Zealander, and that was by a Swiss woman selling necklaces in a market in Bern. Everyone else has thought I was American. This hasn’t really worried me in the least, as I can understand how difficult it would be to non native English speakers to pick up on our different accents (I could never tell an Austrian from a German). But the really astonishing thing is, that within seconds of finding out I’m actually a New Zealander peoples attitude towards me instantly changes, and I suddenly reach an exotic status. Never in my life, have I ever been referred to as exotic, and it’s a title I’m going to be sad to give up in a few weeks time (can you believe there’s actually a New Zealanders club in Vancouver!).

Over the last year there has been a lot of discussion about my accent, from it was too heavy and difficult to understand, to I didn’t have one at all, I’d changed and now sounded American, to I sounded German, or that I sounded like someone learning English for the first time. When I first arrived, Max (the oldest boy) and the old Au Pair Crystal had no problems understanding me, but poor Mike hadn’t a clue what I was on about. I got constantly teased by Frank, and still do – and Nicole had to ask me to repeat my self quite a bit. Nicole said her main problem in understanding me was that I didn’t separate my words enough, and they all blurred together. I had to learn to slow right down when talking, because I’ve since found out New Zealand is one of the fastest English speaking countries.

Over time, Mike got used to me, I slowed down and things were fine. Then Lisa, an old High School friend stayed for a week, my mother showed up and later on so did my sister, and once again my accent was put under the spotlight, and everyone in the house decided I was the most difficult to understand of all New Zealanders. This must’ve gotten to me a bit, because shortly after that friends back home started commenting that I sounded really bizarre on the phone, like I’d either had a stroke, or was learning English for the first time. It was a few months later that my sister said I sounded like an out right American, with a distinct twang and rolling my ‘r’s. Of course I don’t notice it at all, apart from that I never realised how much random Maori (native language of NZ) I spoke. Saying the greetings ‘kia ora’ and ‘ka kete’ were quite difficult to stop, and other words would pop up unexpectedly, like ‘puku’ for your stomach. I now have Max counting to ten in Maori, as he loves soaking in as much knowledge as possible.

Anyway back to the article I read, it said the New Zealand accent is getting a lot stronger and more distinct from the Australian accent, and that there's even a bit of Cockney creeping in too, as people are not fully pronouncing the "t" sound in words like "what" and "but". Another random thing that I’d never thought about, was the word ‘Kiwi’. I recently chose the username ‘kiwigirl84’ on a website, and the amount of mail I got asking what was my obsession with ‘Kiwis’? I replied saying it was simply because I was a New Zealander, and their reply was ‘huh’? So I asked around a bit, and an alarming amount of people had no idea New Zealanders were called Kiwi’s, or that if they had they didn’t know it was because of the bird - wait there's a kiwi bird?? Then I got others saying I was ‘over stating New Zealand’s impact on the world’, alrighty then. The general consensus was that the term ‘Kiwi’ is really only known in the Commonwealth, New Zealand is a mystical, beautiful country where we all live in shacks, its on the list of places to go, but they’ll probably never get there because its too far away, and alarmingly a hell of a lot of people have no idea where our country is, what language we speak or what we look like. Random huh? Anyways thought that might interest you folks back home.

Ka kete anö