The New Zealand accent in IELTS listening
New Zealand English is in the published accent set for both IELTS and TOEFL, and it is the accent candidates are least likely to have practised with. It is non-rhotic, like British and Australian, and it is frequently mistaken for Australian by people who have not heard much of either.
The feature that separates them is the KIT vowel. In New Zealand English the vowel in six, fish and sit moves towards the centre of the mouth — the sound English speakers write as uh. Six drifts towards sux, fish and chips towards the phrase New Zealanders are endlessly teased about. Australian does not do this, which makes it the quickest way to tell the two apart.
For a listener, the risk is specific rather than general: most of the sentence arrives normally and one short word lands somewhere unexpected. In a Part 1 form-completion task, where the answer may be a single word, that is exactly where a mark goes.
Hear it
Every accent page plays this same sentence, read by a speaker of the same gender, so what changes between pages is the accent alone. The marked words are the ones to listen to.
Right — I'll be about twenty minutes. I'm stopping at the market for six tomatoes and a bottle of water, then I'll come straight to yours.
Listen to “six”. Where does the vowel sit?
Now listen to “minutes”. The vowel in the first syllable:
What to listen for
“six”
The tell. The vowel centralises towards “uh”, so it lands closer to “sux” than to the British or Australian “six”.
“market”
Non-rhotic: no r, as in British and Australian.
“minutes”
Another KIT vowel in the first syllable — listen for the same centralising movement.
“tomatoes”
tom-AH-toes, following British rather than American.
Where it turns up in the exam
New Zealand is named in the accent sets of both exams — IELTS mixes British, Australian, New Zealand and North American, and ETS lists New Zealand among TOEFL's voices. It appears less often than the others, which is precisely why meeting it for the first time on test day is expensive.
How to get it into your ear
This is the accent worth a deliberate half hour, because it is the one you are least likely to meet by accident. Find any New Zealand news or interview audio and listen only for short i — six, fish, minutes, list, sit. Ignore everything else. The goal is narrow and achievable: stop the centralised vowel being a surprise, so that when it turns up in a Part 1 answer you hear a word rather than a noise.
Common questions
How do I tell New Zealand from Australian?
Listen to a short i. Six, fish, chips, minutes: if the vowel sounds pushed towards uh, it is New Zealand. If it stays where you expect, it is Australian. Both drop the r, so rhoticity will not help you.
Is it worth practising an accent I might not even hear?
The cost of being surprised is higher than the cost of the practice. A few minutes of exposure removes the moment of confusion, and that moment is what makes a candidate lose the next two answers rather than just the one.
Compare it with the others
The same sentence, so the difference you hear is the accent.
Is the accent the problem, or the speed?
Usually it is neither on its own. The free listening check is three minutes and tells you which listening skills your misses actually cluster in.
Take the free listening test →Lisenia is an independent study tool. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to the British Council, IDP, Cambridge Assessment English or ETS. These samples are synthesised voices used to illustrate accent features, not recordings of exam material.