Foreign languages

The actuality of the work: The actuality of the work is to analyze of educational importance of the New Zealand variant of the English language. Acknowledge each academic article, website, and other source that you utilized to conduct your research.
The main aim of the work is to study the practical and theoretical importance of the New Zealand variant of the English language.


The structure of the work: consists of two chapters, introduction and conclusion with bibliography.

CHAPTER I. THE GENERAL OUTLINE INFORMATION ON ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND ANALYSIS OF THE VARIANT OF NEW ZEALAND

1. A historical background and overview of New Zealand English

From the 1790s, New Zealand was visited by British, French and American whaling, sealing and trading ships. Their crews traded European goods with the indigenous Māori. The first settlers to New Zealand were mainly from Australia, many of them ex-convicts or escaped convicts. Sailors, explorers and traders from Australia and other parts of Europe also settled.
When in 1788 the colony of New South Wales was formed, most of New Zealand was nominally included, but no real legal authority or control was exercised. However, when the New Zealand Company announced in 1839 its plans to establish colonies in New Zealand this and the increased commercial interests of merchants in Sydney and London spurred the British to take stronger action. Captain William Hobson was sent to New Zealand to persuade Māori to cede their sovereignty to the British Crown and on 6 February 1840, Hobson and about forty Māori chiefs signed the Treaty of Waitangi at Waitangi in the Bay of Islands.^[17] From this point onward there was considerable European settlement, primarily from England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland; and to a lesser extent the United States, South Africa, and various parts of continental Europe. Some 400,000 settlers came from Britain, of whom 300,000 stayed permanently. Most were young people and 250,000 babies were born. New Zealand ceased to be part of New South Wales and became a British colony on 1 July 1841.
Gold discoveries in Otago (1861) and Westland (1865), caused a worldwide gold rush that more than doubled the population from 71,000 in 1859 to 164,000 in 1863. Between 1864 and 1865, under the New Zealand Settlements Act 1863, 13 ships carrying citizens of England, Ireland and South Africa arrived in New Zealand under the Waikato Immigration Scheme.⁵
According to census data from 1871, around half the early settlers were English, a quarter were Irish, a quarter were Scots and 5% were Australian.^[19] The European population of New Zealand grew explosively from fewer than 1000 in 1831 to 500,000 by 1881. By 1911 the number of European settlers had reached a million. The settlement of peoples from various foreign countries and the intermingling of the people with the indigenous Māori brought about what would eventually evolve into a "New Zealand accent" and a unique regional English lexicon. A distinct New Zealand variant of the English language has been recognised since at least 1912, when Frank Arthur Swinnerton described it as a "carefully modulated murmur". From the beginning of the haphazard Australian and European settlements and latter official British migrations, a new dialect began to form by adopting Māori words to describe the different flora and fauna of New Zealand, for which English did not have words of its own. The New Zealand accent appeared first in towns with mixed populations of immigrants from Australia, England, Ireland, and Scotland. These included the militia towns of the North Island and the gold-mining towns of the South Island. In more homogeneous towns such as those in Otago and Southland, settled mainly by people from Scotland, the New Zealand accent took longer to appear, while the accent was quick to develop in schools starting from the 1890s.⁶
Since the latter 20th century New Zealand society has gradually divested itself of its fundamentally British roots and has adopted influences from all over the world, especially in the early 21st century when New Zealand experienced an increase of non-British immigration which has since brought about a more prominent multi-national society. The Internet, television, movies and popular music have all brought international influences into New Zealand society and the New Zealand lexicon. Americanization of New Zealand society and language has subtly and gradually been taking place since World War II and especially since the 1970s, as has happened also in neighbouring Australia. New Zealand is a young nation with a relatively recent history of settlement and language development. The linguistic interest in the country’s language variety is much younger. Serious academic treatment of NZE began only in the late 1970s, probably as a result of a growth of a New Zealand national culture and political independence, as Hundt argues. For a long time the analysis of NZE had been overshadowed by that of Australian English (henceforth AusE) and was treated like a regional variety of AusE. Today this is compared with the treatment of Canadian and American English.⁷ Linguists recently identified NZE as an independent variety of English and began their descriptive work which mainly dealt with vocabulary and pronunciation, the most obvious differences to other varieties. Still, NZE belongs to those varieties “that are not fully institutionalised, its standard has not yet been described”. This is why Clyne classified NZE as a “semi-centre” variety in 1995, i.e. a variety which has been identified as such but there are no attempts to codify it. In contrast Clyne terms British English and American English as “full centres” and AusE as “nearly full centre”. This is no longer valid. Several dictionaries of NZE have been published since, the most important are The New Zealand Dictionary (1994) and the Oxford Dictionary of New Zealand English (1997). Of course dictionaries record mainly lexical information but there are extensive works on NZE grammar (Hundt 1998) as well as on phonetic and phonological characteristics (e.g. Gordon et al. 2004; Bell/Kuiper 2000). So one can definitely say that NZE has crossed the threshold and become at least “nearly full centre” in Clyne’s terminology. Nevertheless, there is still much research to be done. Concerning the origins and historical development of NZE there are basically two opposing theories: On the one hand, there is the ‘single origin theory’ which was strongly supported by leading researchers in the 1980s and early 1990s. They were convinced that NZE developed from only one source “with a dash of others” but they did not agree about the original source: One group believed that NZE derived from London Cockney, the other group was sure that AusE, which was actually strongly influenced by Cockney, had the major impact. On the other hand, there is the ‘mixing bowl theory’ or ‘new-dialect formation’ which claims that NZE is an “amalgam of the various relocated dialects” brought to New Zealand by settlers from the British Isles and Australia. This approach is the dominant one today, even researchers that stuck to the single origin theory before (e.g. Gordon/Trudgill and Bauer) now believe that the mixing bowl theory is more likely. But still the single origin approach is not completely excluded. In supermarkets all over the world we can find a small egg-shaped fruit with a greenish and brownish colour. Everyone knows this fruit as kiwi. In fact, the original name of the fruit is Chinese Gooseberry. But as the main kiwi- growing country in the world is New Zealand, the berry was named after an endemic flightless bird, the heraldic beast of New Zealand, the kiwi. This happened because of the similarity of both fruit and bird. Like the names of most plants and animals in New Zealand, the expression kiwi has its origin in the language of the native inhabitants of the islands, the Maoris. It is interesting to see that a word of such a very small people - the Maori belong to the Polynesian family of nations and now count about 350,000 (~ 10% of the population of New Zealand) - nowadays is known and common all over the world. But as the kiwi fruit is one of the main exporting products of New Zealand this does not surprise. How about other words from the Maori language? How far did they make it into other languages, especially into the standard variety of New Zealand English? How advanced is the level of integration into New Zealand English? What kind of words are, nowadays, used and where? Are they used only in the spoken language or in writing, too? To answer this questions a good way is to search the two corpora of New Zealand English, the Wellington Corpus of Written New Zealand English (WWC) and the Wellington Corpus of Spoken New Zealand English (WSC). But first it is important to know something about the history of the Maori language and the history of borrowings from Maori into New Zealand English.