Pronunciation
Fish and Chips: The Vowel That Separates New Zealand from Australia
New Zealanders centralise the vowel in fish and six towards the sound in the, which is why Australians hear fush and chups. Australian English keeps the vowel high and front, so the same words come back as feesh and cheeps in the other direction. The two accents share most of their vowel system, and this is one of the few places they part company.
The question, as everyone in the survey sees it
Say “fish” and “six”. Is that vowel closer to the one in “feet”, or to the “uh” in “the”?
Say them at a normal pace in a sentence. Both are completely normal, and neither is the careful reading pronunciation.
- Closer to the vowel in “feet”
- Closer to the “uh” in “the”
- It varies
- I cannot tell
Which accents do what
Each accent profile in the survey has an expected answer to this question. Where a profile allows more than one answer, the region genuinely varies.
Closer to the vowel in “feet”
In these profiles, closer to the vowel in “feet”.
Why this question is in the survey
Pronunciation questions carry more weight in the scoring than vocabulary questions do, because they are much harder to change deliberately. People move house and pick up new words; the vowel system learned in childhood tends to stay. Every answer is stored with a coarse map cell for the town you grew up in, and a region is coloured in once at least five people there have answered.
See the full question bank, the accent profiles these answers feed, or how the scoring works.