ABSTRACT
English speakers first landed in New Zealand in the years around 1780-1800, but the English language arrived as a significant force in New Zealand, with large groups of immigrants, only in the period from 1840 onwards. The English of New Zealand is the most recently formed major variety of natively-spoken English in the world, with perhaps only the English of the Falkland Islands postdating. In this paper I argue that an unusual set of circumstances due to the colonial new-dialect formation situation, together with a possibly unique data set, enables us to gain accurate information about the way in which at least some forms of British English were pronounced long before the advent of electronic recording techniques.
