Country matters #6

Michael Baume in the Spectator on cow dialects:

Keeping inequality in proper perspective, the London Evening Standard last week ran a full page article quoting Sir Patrick Stewart’s US National Public Radio talk explaining that the dialects of British cows’ moos reflect, like their human counterparts, ‘a society dominated by class, social status and location’. He noted that ‘the sound made by a cow from West Oxfordshire, birthplace and home to many right of centre politicians, is quite an upper-class bray compared with those from West Yorkshire’. The National Farmers Union backed this up, maintaining that when cows are mo(o)ved from one area of strong accents to another, there is a problem of them initially not responding to the new accent. ‘Cows in the West Country have the distinctive Somerset twang (more of a ‘moo-arr’) while Midlands beasts moo with Brummie accents and Geordie tones are heard Tyneside. And in the US, those bred in the southern states sound very different from the moos heard in the north’. In the Anglosphere’s animal farms, all cows are not equal.

I wonder if this is the case in New Zealand, that a Friesian from Southland might have a different moo from a Waikato Friesian’s, perhaps with a hint of a burr. 

National’s Bill English is a farmer from Dipton in Southland and Labour’s Jacinda Ardern is from Morrinsville in the Waikato, so perhaps this could be a question in the Leaders’ Debate come the election. Can they tell the difference between regional moos?