The earliest settlements in New Zealand planned by the New Zealand Company aimed to replicate a vertical slice of British society with the top and the bottom levels removed so that there were not large numbers of people from the highest class in Britain or the very lowest class:

The pioneers of New Zealand were not from the highest, nor were they usually from the most down-trodden of British society. They were people who while poor, while usually from the upper working class or lower middle class – ‘the anxious classes’ Wakefield called them – had lost neither enterprise nor ambition. (Sinclair 1991: 101)

Social class stratification in early New Zealand settlements differed from Britain. The historian James Belich (1996: 321) remarks: “Colonial life blurred class boundaries and mixed together all elements of society. Jack considered himself in many respects as good as his master. But there were still boundaries to blur and elements to mix. Master was still master, and Jack was still Jack”. Evidence from the Mobile Unit archive shows that some of those who would have been considered upper class in New Zealand maintained strong ties with Britain and their speech shows little or no evidence of a New Zealand accent. Miss Brenda Bell, for example, a third generation New Zealander born in 1880 in Otago who talks at length about her titled ancestors, and who was educated by an imported English governess, speaks old-fashioned RP. Mrs Catherine Dudley, born six years later also in Otago, who was married to a road mender, is always identified by New Zealand university students as “sounding like a New Zealander”.

Although New Zealanders like to portray themselves as a “classless society” it is widely recognised that social class differences exist in present-day New Zealand. Social scientists, however, are very wary of using imported standards of classification. The standard New Zealand index used by social scientists to assign social class (Elley and Irving 1985) is based on occupation, and needs to be used with some caution. The Elley-Irving scale gives a numerical category of 6 to those in the lowest social class (e.g. unskilled labourers and supermarket checkout assistants) and 1 to professional workers (e.g. lawyers, doctors and university lecturers). For recordings in the Canterbury Corpus archive at the University of Canterbury, a revised version of the Elley-Irving scale prepared by the New Zealand Ministry of Education (1990) is used for occupations. A 6-point education scale is also used where a rating of 6 is given to those who have no secondary school education and 1 to those with a Ph.D. or higher tertiary degree. The two ratings are combined so that the final social class categorization is based on both occupation and education.

However, the conventional method of classification used to define social class variation within NZE is the system devised for Australian English by Mitchell and Delbridge (1965) of Cultivated NZE, General NZE and Broad NZE. On a continuum, Cultivated NZE is nearer to RP, and Broad NZE is farthest from RP. These are not discrete categories but rather points on a continuum.

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