COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF THE BRITISH STANDART OF ENGLISH AND THE NEW ZEALAND VERSION OF ENGLISH LANGUAGES

For a long time the New Zealand version of English language was under the influence of British colonists who affected every aspect of the language, like phonology, lexis and grammar. On account of this, British English started to dominate suppressing minority languages, like the indigenous Te Reo Maori. Due to the colonist's perception of Great Britain as the motherland that should always be followed, for a long time New Zealanders used the British English Standard. Slowly but steadily it began to change. Time has left an obvious imprint on the New Zealand version of English. Sharing a lot of features with British Standard, it has managed to gain and retain its own originality. Vowel shifts, longer pronunciation and vowel transformation are the characteristic linguistic features of English in New Zealand. The purpose of this survey is to make the comparative analysis of the two versions of English - the British Standard and the New Zealand variantconfirming the presence of existing differences between these options with the opinion poll data based on the online RUDN university survey of bachelors and magistrates. This article presents the main influence streams on the New Zealand variant of English. The major one is considered to be the indigenous Maori language. Apart from that, an impact of Pasifika and Australian English can't be ignored. Also two interesting linguistic phenomena as archaic words and distinctive word forms are covered in the text as well as the grammatic distinctions. The survey has revealed differentiating peculiarities in phonology, lexis and grammar being performed as structured tables.