Alanis Morissette and the New Zealand Accent

Hokitika is New Zealand's answer to Prestatyn, with weather to match. So having checked into my hotel room yesterday, I put the television on and made myself a cup of tea. The one programme which wasn't a cartoon was a music review programme which turned its attention to the new Alanis Morissette album. I could be scathing about NZ and say it was 'Jagged Little Pill'. but that would be a cheap joke at the expense of a country of really quite nice people who even have the decency to lose to us at cricket in an attempt to keep our national self-esteem up. The main subject of discussion was that she seems to be much hippier these days. Strange, I thought, she never really struck me as the peace-and-love type; I suppose 'One Hand In My Pocket' is a bit hippyish, but it's not really her style. A couple of shots from the video showed that she's no more broad in the seat that she used to be, so that isn't an option. But no, the discussion went more or less as follows:

Presenter: She does seem to be hippier these days, doesn't she?

Kiwi Teen 1: Yes, some of the songs are quite hippy compared to her other albums.

Kiwi Teen 2: But they're not all that hippy. She's still quite angry at times.

At this point I realised two things. Firstly, they were actually saying "happy". Secondly, I've been here a week and haven't got the hang of the New Zealand accent yet. Because New Zealand does have an accent- it's distinct from the Australian and is distinguished by the compression of vowels- in fact, many Kiwis are almost embarrassed to enunciate vowels and tend to say words like "manager" as "mngr". The e-sound in English speech becomes i, and i becomes u. So Hokitika is pronounced Hokiticker rather than Hokiteeka. It's probably the result of the collision of Scots and Maori in the early days and it makes conversations bloody hard until you've attuned yourself to the other person's accent.

On that note, I'm off to get some fush and chups.