Cultural variation in New Zealand English stories about place

Abstract

This study is set in the context of Aotearoa New Zealand and investigates the influence of cultural knowledge on the type of topics that speakers of New Zealand Englishes (NZEs) associate to in their narrations. A storytelling task based on picture prompts of New Zealand landscapes shows a major difference between the cultural associations of Māori and Pākehā (New Zealand European) participants. The difference can be captured in two cultural frames that underlie the preferred topics chosen by the two groups. The findings are discussed in terms of their implications for defining NZEs, and they also bear ramifications for theory development in Cultural Linguistics, highlighting the nested and flexibly construable nature of cultural conceptualisations. For research on world Englishes, the study is an example of how cultural-linguistic analyses can be extended towards larger cultural framings to explain cultural variation among speakers of Englishes.