On the irrelevance of prestige, stigma and identity in the development of New Zealand English phonology

Our work on the origins of New Zealand English (Cordon et ai, forthcoming) has shown that this newest of all of the major native speaker varieties of English is the result of dialect contact and new-dialect formation. Rather obviously, the dialects which were involved in the initial contact were dialects of English which had been brought from different parts of the British Isles. In terms of population figures, the Englishes that came into contact in New Zealand arrived from England, Scotland and Ireland in roughly the proportion 5:2:2.The north of England was underrepresented, and the Welsh contribution was very low. These proportions tally rather well with Bauer's lexical study (Bauer, 1999), which shows that there are focal points for the dialectal origins of New Zealand lexis 'in Scotland, in Ireland, and in a band stretching from LincolnshireooothroughNottinghamshire, Warwickshire and Somerset to Devon and Cornwall' (p. 52).