Mottainai or The Language Discussions

And, most peculiarly, there is no such word for someone from New Zealand.

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Yeah there is - ‘bro’ :slight_smile:

Warren Zevon taught me that.

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They’re informally known as “kiwis.”

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Canada = Canadians
America = Americans (no “i”)
Colombia = Colombians (keeps the “i”)
Ukraine = Ukrainians (drop the “e” because why not)
Venezuela = Venezuelans (drop the “i”)

… truly, the shower drain of languages.

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And that’s not even touching on the fact that the common word for “people from the US of A” reads like they could come from anywhere on two continents.

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Hmm, true. Also true that one of the handful of things we’ve overloaded the word “kiwi” for is “New Zealander”; but we’d typically use that as “I’m a kiwi” rather than “I’m kiwi”… although a phrase like “that’s the kiwi attitude” works, so I guess it’s somewhere in the middle. It’s an informal usage as JGD says, but an exceedingly normal one for NZers to use. I don’t know to what extent it’s recognised outside of NZ though (especially in places where, having no need to distinguish between multiple meanings of the word, “kiwi” just means the fruit – which we refer to as “kiwifruit”).

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I’ve also heard “NZs”, pronounced “enzies”, but not often.

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That’s a new one to me. It’s reasonable enough, but I can only imagine all the enzies being confused by it :).

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We’ve been to Kiwi Land so we’ve known the term for a while. I think it’s not well known if you don’t have any connection.

We’re still calling the fruit Kiwi :smiling_face: and the bird. context usually helps with not mixing them up. i might ask my partner “hey did you buy some kiwis at the supermarket?” while I might ask my uncle " are your kiwi friends coming to visit this year"

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They are. And formally as ‘New Zealanders.’

But while a person from England is English, and a person from Australia is Australian, there is no word to describe a person from New Zealand. A New Zealander isn’t New Zealandish, or New Zealandian. At a pinch they can be described as Kiwi, but it’s both informal and not wholly satisfactory.

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People calling kiwifruit kiwis really annoys me. More than it should, probably.

But I’m old and grumpy. So old that when I lived in NZ as a child, the fruit was still called ‘chinese gooseberry’ as much if not more than ‘kiwifruit.’

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Like all language, its about context - we don’t really have much reason to discuss the bird Kiwi and if you’re talking about people rather than fruit, its usually fairly obvious. For example, the phrase ‘Ah shit, all the kiwis have gone rotten’ - I’ll leave you to decide which Kiwi/kiwi that might be referring to :slight_smile:

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Oh, I understand all that, it’s just that a kiwi is a bird, and the fruit is a kiwifruit, so in my head calling the fruit a kiwi is just plain wrong.

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Reference works seem to agree with you on this, but I don’t understand why ‘New Zealander’ or ‘New Zealand’ wouldn’t be a perfectly English adjective.

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All of them, of course…

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Unfortunately ‘I am New Zealander’ doesn’t make grammatical sense in English.

And ‘I am New Zealand’ is just claiming to be the country, not to be from it.

There ought to be a term to mean ‘New Zealandish,’ but there just - isn’t.

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The All Blacks??

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I think this deserves a poll on which demonym is the “corrrect” one.

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Oh, I definitely agree that “New Zealand” can’t be used as a predicate adjective—far too confusing. But it seems to me that it is already used as an adjective in other contexts, for example, “a New Zealand wine” or “New Zealand passports”.

I think saying that “I am New Zealander” doesn’t make grammatical sense in English is begging the question. I’m saying that I think “New Zealander” can function as an English adjective. If I’m right, then it does make grammatical sense. If I’m wrong, then it doesn’t. :face_with_tongue:

But “I am New Zealander” sounds sensical to me. And English is largely governed by what sounds sensical to its speakers. So now I guess I just need to convince hundreds of thousands of people they agree with me.

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