Regional Accents

I was just reading a blog post (and related articles) about how accents affect how we think of people and how nowadays people often try to hold on (or exaggerate) to their regional accents to show their link to the place. I think that generally this happens more when a person is taken away from their origins. For example, the lovely me :P, when I moved over here I found it weird that I spoke differently and that people noticed it but I really didn't want to lose my accent. Unfortunately, I have now almost totally lost my accent - very few people pick up on the fact that I'm not from Britain, if they do notice anything they have no idea what sort of (hint of) accent it is that I have. Amazingly, a little earlier this year one guy I met at a party did actually notice and asked if I was from New Zealand or Australia :). He apparently worked with some people from NZ hence why he picked up on it. But that was kind of cool. I really liked being individual, and losing my accent made me feel a bit like I lost a link to NZ. I have so few links that it was a bit sad. Even my cousin who was over here about 3 years before I was apparently has a more kiwi accent than me!
However, I have to admit that kiwi accents can be really annoying and whiny, lol. But I still love them.
I actually find it really hard to attempt a kiwi accent nowadays. The main differences I have picked up on are how kiwis say 'e' more like 'i', whereas brits say 'e' more like 'a'. Also, we often raise the pitch of our voice at the end of a sentence (kind of like a question - but it is still distinguishable from an actual question) and we use the invariant tag 'eh' ('ay') quite a lot.

Yeah, so I just thought I'd blog about this... not sure why, I just felt like it, eh.