Here are some words spoken by a New Zealand woman, Glennis Ryder. Glennis grew up in Foxton (near Palmerston North, in the lower half of the North Island). She is of European descent. At the time of the recording she was 37 years old and had never been overseas. Glennis gave permission for her voice to be used on this website and for these facts about her to be made public.
Click on the speaker to hear her pronunciation of the words in that row. Each row of words has been recorded as an ".aif" file.
If you have the application "theWebPlayer", it will draw on your screen an excellent pitch plot and spectrogram of these sounds as well. "theWebPlayer" is a shareware application for PC or Mac (US $10.00 per copy). It can be downloaded from: http://www.sciconrd.com/
 |
tree | student | Paul | |
|
|
tour | water | enthusiasm | | |
|
nuclear | nude | | ||
|
dunce | dance | chance | | |
|
example | transplant | | ||
|
pulp | gulf | golf | | |
|
peering | baring | pairing | | |
|
doll | dole | colt | | |
|
fire | fireman | fire engine | | |
|
tower | towers | towering | | |
|
fewer | cure | curing | | |
|
batted | battered | | ||
|
sense | cents | | ||
|
assume | presume | | ||
|
boring | boar | board | bored | |
|
city | seedy | | ||
|
rule | gruel | | ||
|
fault | fort | | ||
|
tune | dune | | ||
|
Pete | pit | pet | pat | |
|
put | pot | putt | | |
|
baddy | daddy | | ||
|
bee | bay | buy | | |
|
bough | bow | boy | | |
|
boot | boat | bout | | |
|
ferry | fairy | | ||
|
bird | bard | | ||
|
pull | pool | pill | | |
|
fellow | fallow | | ||
|
kill | cull | | ||
|
reel | real | | ||
|
poor | pour | pore | paw | |
|
groan | grown | | ||
|
moan | mown | | ||
|
allusion | illusion | | ||
|
weather | whether | | ||
|
beer | bear | | ||
|
here | hair | ear | air | |
|
fear | fair | fare | | |
|
spear | spare | shear | share | |
|
kea | care | cheer | chair | |
|
really | rarely | |
These words have been identified as potentially
diagnostic of New Zealand English in Holmes and Bell (1988):
Holmes, Janet & Allan Bell. (1988). Learning by experience:
Notes for New Zealand social dialectologists. Te Reo
31,19-50.
The information on this page was provided
on 11 September 2000.
The author of this page is:
John Newman
Department of Linguistics
Faculty of Arts
University of Alberta
Edmonton AB
T6G 2E7 Canada
email: john.newman@ualberta.ca