happy medium

HRT, nope not that HRT, but high rising terminal. This has been bugging me for some time. Spotted the trend of people ending sentences as if it’s a question? Where someones talking and they pitch up at the end of the sentence, making it sound like a question. Well, turns out this feature of speech has a name – high rising terminal – up-talk or up-speak. According to information stolen from wikipedia, it’s used as a tool to encourage the listener into the conversation, but shows the user has not yet finished and to avoid interruption.

The reason I’m mentioning this is that I’m noticing it more here in New Zealand, where it may have even originated. The theory is a lot of Kiwis will also end a sentence with an “eh”, like “went to the beach eh” Funnily enough, back home it’s referred to as ‘Australian Questioning Intonation’, and the finger is pointed at the ozzy soaps.

Regarding the New Zealand accent, the only major difference is that Kiwi’s vowel shift. So for example pair will sound like peer to an Englishman, pen like pin. It can sound a bit softer than that. However, took me ages to figure out a guy’s name was Ken, and not Keen…

Other than that, the most famous phrase is the use of “she” instead of “it” – “she’ll be alright” – “it’ll be alright”. You’ll hear “Choice” and “Sweet as” a fair amount too!

For Kiwi’s (or anyone to be honest!) a leicester accent is not a pretty one. For starters, Leicester, or anything ending in “er”, is pronounced with a dull “a”, so leicester becomes lessta, or lesstuh. “innit” is used at the end of every sentence, instead of the kiwi “eh”. Being stuck in the middle of the country, it’s a mixture of northern and southern pronunciations. Mixing of was and were can be particularly bad, but is less common now – for example “she were on the bus”

Other gem’s include (loads more here)

giz a goo – Can I have a go?
gorra gerra bus – I have to catch a bus
bit nippy enit – rather cold isn’t it?
i aint purrin up wiit – this will not do
ayah – ouch!
mardy – in a bad mood
bare – a lot of something e.g. I got bare cash
dunno – I don’t know
gaff – home
Keep yer airon – calm down
on yer bike – would you mind vacating my personal space
seen – ok
eyar – there you go

Happy New Year everyone!

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 4th, 2007 at 12:30 pm and is filed under happy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.