This chapter examines vowel reduction in a New Zealand English speaker, arguing that it involves three independent processes: mora loss, feature loss, and mora restoration. The study challenges traditional accounts by showing that vowel reduction is not merely a feature change but a systematic process affecting moraicity. The speaker’s vowel system shows considerable complexity, with surface schwa types shaped by stress, moraicity, and phonological context. Notably, the speaker distinguishes between super-short, short, and long schwas, with short and long schwas alternating with super-short schwa in unstressed positions. In the speaker’s speech, unstressed vowels first lose their moras and then undergo feature loss, becoming non-moraic schwa. Some vowels undergo mora restoration, regaining moraic status in specific environments. The chapter also examines unstressed vowel alternations, showing that vowel reduction operates differently in lexical and function words. Acoustic data from experiments confirm that duration serves as a key indicator of moraic status. These findings show that vowel reduction results from interacting phonological mechanisms.

In this chapter we discuss the results of the experimental component to the study, which is designed to examine the degree to which the probabilistic contrasts uncovered in the corpus analysis are also discernible in language users’ introspective preferences. These experiments were designed to corroborate and interrogate the scope of the patterns observed in our corpus models.

This chapter includes a succinct review of World Englishes and dialect typology literature, with a focus on the main theoretical paradigms within this sphere (e.g. the Three Circles model and the Dynamic Model). We then introduce the nine regional varieties of English under study in the book: British English, Canadian English, Irish English, New Zealand English, Hong Kong English, Indian English, Jamaican English, Philippine English, and Singapore English. The discussion includes a brief summary of relevant aspects of these varieties’ sociohistories as well as their linguistic profiles.

This chapter gives an overview of the development of lexicography in New Zealand before and after the publication of the landmark Dictionary of New Zealand English in 1997. Attention is given to the importance of the Maori language in New Zealand English and the ways in which slang has been over-emphasised as a characteristic of this variety of English. As well as monolingual English dictionaries, the chapter includes some discussion of dictionaries in New Zealand's two official languages, Maori and New Zealand Sign Language.

This chapter looks at the spread of English to countries of the Southern Hemisphere, notably Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. These “Southern Hemisphere Englishes” (including the islands of Tristan da Cunha and the Falklands in the South Atlantic) have been found to have a lot in common both historically and linguistically: similar settlement periods (the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries) and strategies (typically large-scale, organized settlement moves of lower- and middle-class people from the British Isles, mainly southern and south-eastern England). Their descendants today constitute large native-speaking communities of direct British ancestry. They faced similar situations – unfamiliar territory and climate and, most importantly, the need to deal and communicate with earlier residents of the areas they migrated to. In the long run, these peoples – Aboriginals in Australia; Maoris in New Zealand; Africans, Afrikaners, and later also Indians in South Africa – have adopted and transformed English, using it for their own purposes, and many of them have shifted to it, thus producing new ethnic varieties like Aboriginal English or Maori English. Cast studies and language samples focus on Australian English (including a discussion of pronunciation features in a "footie" sports program) and South African varieties of English.

Australasia and the Pacific encompass a range of diverse native and non-native Englishes, including contact varieties such as pidgins and creoles. The chapter provides a new approach to these varieties by focusing on their geographical closeness and structural patterns that have the potential of being areal features of Australasian and (South) Pacific Englishes. Owing to the interaction of conditioning factors in language evolution, such features are not only difficult to define but also difficult to trace. Therefore, a significant section of the chapter provides a detailed theoretical discussion on areal features in Australasia and the South Pacific. Finally, three different scenarios are outlined in which the emergence of areal features for at least a number of these varieties seems to be apparent: parallel developments of Australian and New Zealand English; the possible influence of Pasifika Englishes in New Zealand on other varieties; and the effect of similarities in substrate languages, cultural practices, and in the external ecology as a precursor to areal features for ESL, EFL, ethnic varieties, pidgins, and creoles in Australasia and the Pacific.