Māori or te reo
Māori ( ) commonly te reo ("the
language"), is the language of the indigenous population of
New
Zealand
, the Maori people,
where it has is the status of an official language. Linguists
classify it within the
Eastern Polynesian languages as
being closely related to
Cook
Islands Māori,
Tuamotuan and
Tahitian; somewhat less closely to
Hawaiian and
Marquesan; and more distantly to the
languages of Western Polynesia, including
Samoan,
Tokelauan,
Niuean and
Tongan.
Official status
New Zealand has three
official
languages — Māori,
English and
New Zealand Sign Language. Māori gained this
status with the passing of the
Māori Language Act in 1987. Most
government departments and agencies have bilingual names, for
example, the
Department of
Internal Affairs Te Tari Taiwhenua, and places such as
local government offices and public libraries display bilingual
signs and use bilingual stationery.
New
Zealand Post recognises Māori place-names in
postal addresses. Dealings with
government agencies may be conducted in Māori, but in practice this
almost always requires
interpreter,
restricting its everyday use to the limited geographical areas of
high Māori fluency, and to more formal occasions, such as during
public consultation.
An interpreter is on hand at sessions of
Parliament, in case a Member wishes
to speak in Māori. In 2008, Opposition parties held a
filibuster against a local government Bill, and
those who could recorded their voice votes in Māori, all faithfully
interpreted.
A 1994 ruling by the
Privy Councilin
the United Kingdom held the New Zealand Government responsible
under the
Treaty of Waitangi
(1840) for the preservation of the language. Accordingly since
March 2004, the state has funded
Māori Television, broadcast partly in
Māori. On
28 March 2008
Māori Television launched its second channel,
Te Reo, broadcast entirely in the Māori
language, with no advertising or subtitles.In 2008
Land Information New Zealand
published the first list of official place names with macrons,
which indicate long vowels. Previous place name lists were derived
from systems (usually mapping and
GIS systems)
that could not handle macrons.
History
Māori came
to New Zealand as Eastern Polynesians
voyaging most likely from the Hawaiki or
from the Society
Islands
, in seagoing canoe —
possibly double-hulled and probably sail-rigged. These
settlers probably arrived by about AD 1200 (see
Māori origins. Their language and its dialects
developed in isolation until the 19th century.
Since about 1800 the Māori language has had a tumultuous history.
It started this period as the predominant language of New Zealand.
In the 1860s it became a
minority
language in the shadow of the
English spoken by settlers, missionaries,
gold seekers, and traders from a wide variety of ethnic
backgrounds. In the late 19th century the colonial governments of
New Zealand and its provinces introduced an English-style school
system for all New Zealanders, and from the 1880s the authorities
forbade the use of Māori in schools (possibly at the request of
Māori
leader, who appreciated the value
to their young people of fluent English — see
Native Schools). Increasing numbers of
Māori people learned English.
Until
World War II (1939-1945) most
Māori people spoke Māori as their first language. Worship took
place in Māori; it functioned as the language of Māori homes; Māori
politicians conducted political meetings in Māori; and some
literature and many newspapers appeared in Māori.
As late as the 1930s, some Māori parliamentarians suffered
disadvantage because
Parliament's proceedings took place
in English. From this period the number of speakers of Māori began
to decline rapidly. By the 1980s fewer than 20% of Māori spoke the
language well enough to be classed as native speakers. Even many of
those people no longer spoke Māori in the home. As a result, many
Māori children failed to learn their ancestral language, and
generations of non-Māori-speaking Māori emerged.
By the 1980s Māori
leader began to
recognize the dangers of the loss of their language and initiated
Māori-language recovery-programs such as the
Kōhanga Reo movement, which from 1982 immersed
infants in Māori from infancy to school age. There followed in the
later 1980s the founding of the
Kura Kaupapa Māori, a primary-school
programme in Māori.
Linguistic classification
Comparative linguist classify Māori
as a Polynesian language;
specifically as an Eastern
Polynesian language belonging to the Tahitic subgroup, which includes Rarotongan, spoken in the southern
Cook
Islands
, and Tahitian,
spoken in Tahiti
and the
Society
Islands. Other major Eastern Polynesian languages
include Hawaiian, Marquesan (languages in the Marquesic subgroup), and the Rapa Nui language of Easter Island
While the preceding are all distinct
languages, they remain similar enough that
Tupaia, a Tahitian travelling with
Captain
James Cook in 1769-1770,
communicated effectively with Māori.
Speakers of modern
Māori generally report that they find the languages of the Cook Islands, including Rarotongan, the easiest other Polynesian
languages to understand and converse in. See also
Austronesian languages.
Geographic distribution
Nearly all speakers are ethnic Māori resident in New Zealand.
Estimates of the number of speakers vary: the 1996 census reported
160,000, while other estimates have reported as few as
50,000.According to the 2006 census, 131,613 Māori (23.7%) "could
[at least] hold a conversation about everyday things in te reo
Māori". In the same census, Māori speakers were 4.2% of the New
Zealand population.
The level of competence of self-professed Māori speakers varies
from minimal to total. Statistics have not been gathered for the
prevalence of different levels of competence. Only a minority of
self-professed speakers use Māori as their main language in the
home. The rest use only a few words or phrases (passive
bilingualism).
Māori is a
community language in some predominantly-Māori settlements in the
Northland
, Urewera and East Cape areas. Kohanga reo Māori-immersion kindergartens
throughout New Zealand use Māori exclusively. Increasing numbers of
Māori raise their children bilingually
Urbanisation after the Second World War led to widespread language
shift from Māori predominance (with Māori the primary language of
the rural
whānau) to English
predominance (English serving as the primary language in the
Pākehā cities). Therefore Māori-speakers
almost always communicate bilingually, with
New Zealand English as either their
first or second language.
The percentage prevalence of the Māori language in the Māori
diaspora is far lower than in New Zealand. Census data from
Australia show it as the home language of
5,504 people in 2001, or 7.5% of the Māori community in Australia.
This represents an increase of 32.5% since 1996.
Orthography
The modern Māori alphabet has 20 letters, two of which are
digraphs: A Ā E Ē H I Ī K M N O Ō P R T U Ū W NG and WH.An
underlined
k sometimes appears when writing the Southern
dialect, to indicate that the /k/ in question corresponds to the
ng of the standard language. Various methods are used to
indicate glottal stops when writing the
Wanganui dialect.Attempts to write Māori words
using the
Roman alphabet began with
Captain James Cook and other early explorers, with varying degrees
of felicity. From 1814, missionaries tried to capture the sounds of
the language. William Kendall published a book in 1815 entitled
He Korao no New Zealand, which in modern orthography and
usage would be
He Kōrero nō Aotearoa.
Professor Samuel Lee, working with chief
Hongi Hika and Hongi's junior relative
Waikato at Cambridge University
, established a definitive orthography based on
Northern usage in 1820. Professor Lee's orthography
continues in use, with only two major changes: the addition of
wh to distinguish the bilabial voiceless fricative
phoneme from the labio-velar phoneme /w/;
and the consistent marking of long vowels. The
macron has become the generally accepted device for
marking long vowels (
hāngi), but at times the device of
double vowel letters was used (
haangi).
The Māori embraced literacy enthusiastically, and missionaries
reported in the 1820s that Māori all over the country taught each
other to read and write, using sometimes quite innovative materials
in the absence of paper, such as leaves and charcoal, carved wood,
and hides.
Resolution of the problem of spelling long vowels
The alphabet devised at Cambridge University was deficient in that
it did not mark vowel length. The follow examples show that vowel
length is phonemic in Māori:
- ata 'morning', āta 'carefully'
- mana 'prestige', māna 'for him/her'
- manu 'bird', mānu 'float'
- o 'of', ō 'provisions for a journey'
Māori devised ways to mark vowel-length, sporadically at first.
Occasional and inconsistent vowel-length markings occur in
19th-century manuscripts and newspapers written by Māori, including
macron-like
diacritics and the doubling of
letters. Sir
Apirana Ngata's
Maori
Grammar and Conversation (7th printing 1953) uses macrons, but
only inconsistently. Once the Māori language started to be taught
in universities in the 1960s, vowel-length marking was made
systematic. At Auckland University, Professor
Bruce Biggs (of
Ngāti Maniapoto descent) promoted the
use of double vowels (thus
Maaori), and this became the
standard at Auckland until Biggs died in 2000. But the use of
macrons was promoted by other universities and eventually by the
Māori Language
Commission, established by the Māori Language Act 1987 as the
authority for Māori spelling and orthography.
Phonology
Māori has five phonemically distinct vowel articulations and ten
consonant phonemes.
Vowels
Although it is commonly claimed that vowel realisations
(pronunciations) in Māori show little variation, linguistic
research has shown this not to be the case.
Vowel length is phonemic; but four of the five long vowels occur in
only a handful of word roots, the exception being /ā/. As noted
above, it has recently become standard in Māori spelling to
indicate a long vowel by a macron.
As in many other Polynesian languages, there are no diphthongs in
Māori (when two vowels are adjacent, each belongs to a different
syllable), and all or nearly all sequences of nonidentical vowels
are possible. All sequences of nonidentical short vowels occur and
are phonemically distinct.
The following table shows the five vowel phonemes and the
allophones for some of them according to Bauer 1997. Some of these
phonemes occupy large spaces in the anatomical "vowel triangle"
(actually a trapezoid) of tongue positions. For example, /u/ is
sometimes realised (pronounced) as IPA [u].
Consonants
The consonant phonemes of Māori are listed in the following table.
Seven of the ten Māori
consonant letters
have the same pronunciation as they do in the International
Phonetic Alphabet (
IPA). For those that do not,
the IPA
phonetic
transcription is included, enclosed in square brackets per IPA
convention. Māori stops /p, t, k/ are nonaspirated, unlike in
English. Māori /r/ is a
tap, identical
or very similar to the /r/ in
Spanish and to the
r in "very" in
many dialects of England (and slightly less similar to the
t in the
American
English pronunciation of "ci
ty" or
"le
tter").
The pronunciation of /
wh/ is extremely
variable, but its most common pronunciation (its canonical
allophone) is the
labiodental
fricative, IPA found in
English. Another allophone is the
bilabial fricative, IPA , which is usually supposed
to be the sole pre-European pronunciation, although in fact
linguists are not sure of the truth of this supposition.
Because English stops /p, t, k/ primarily have aspiration, speakers
of English often hear the Māori nonaspirated stops as English /b,
d, g/. English speakers also tend to hear Māori /r/ as English /l/.
These ways
of hearing have given rise to place-name spellings which are
incorrect in Maori, like Tolaga Bay
in the North Island and Otago
and Waihola
in the South
Island.
Syllables
Syllables in Māori have one of the
following forms:
V, VV, CV, CVV. This set of four
can be summarized by the notation,
(C)V(V), in
which the segments in parentheses may or may not be present. A
syllable cannot begin with two consonant sounds (the
digraphs ng and
wh represent single consonant
sounds),
and cannot end in a consonant, although some speakers may
occasionally devoice a final vowel. All possible
CV combinations are grammatical, though
wo,
who,
wu, and
whu occur only
in a few loanwords from English such as
wuru, "wool" and
whutuporo, "football".
As in many other Polynesian languages, e.g., Hawaiian, the
rendering of loanwords from English includes representing every
English consonant of the loanword (using the scanty native
consonant inventory; English has 24 consonants to 10 for Māori) and
breaking up consonant clusters. For example, "Presbyterian" has
been borrowed as
Perehipeteriana; no consonant position in
the loanword has been deleted, but /s/ and /b/ have been replaced
with /h/ and /p/, respectively.)
Dialects
Biggs proposed that historically there were two major dialect
groups, North Island and South Island. South Island Māori is
extinct Biggs has analysed North Island Māori as comprising a
western group and an eastern group with the boundary between them
running pretty much along the island's north-south axis.
Within these broad divisions regional variations occur, and
individual regions show tribal variations. The major differences
occur in the pronunciation of words, variation of vocabulary, and
idiom. A fluent speaker of Māori has no problem understanding
dialects other than their own.
There is no significant variation in grammar between dialects.
Vocabulary and pronunciation vary to a greater extent, but this
does not pose barriers to communication.
North Island dialects
In the
southwest of the island, in the Wanganui
(native spelling Whanganui) and Taranaki
regions, the phoneme /h/ is a glottal stop and the phoneme /wh/ is
[ʔw]. In Tūhoe
and the Eastern Bay of
Plenty
(northwestern North Island) ng has merged
with n. In parts of the Far North,
wh has
merged with
w.
South Island dialects
In the extinct South Island dialects,
ng merged with
k. Thus
Kāi Tahu and
Ngāi Tahu are
variations in the name of the same tribe (the latter form is the
one used in acts of Parliament). Since 2000, the government has
altered the official names of several southern place names to the
southern dialect forms by replacing
ng with
k.
New Zealand's highest mountain, known for centuries as
Aoraki in southern Māori dialects that merge
ng
with
k, and as
Aorangi by other Māori, was later
named "Mount Cook", in honor of
Captain
Cook.
Now its sole official name is Aoraki/Mount
Cook
, which favors the local dialect form.
Likewise,
Dunedin
's main research library, the Hocken
Library
, has the name Te Uare Taoka o Hākena
rather than northern Te Whare Taonga o
Hākena.
Grammar
Bases
Biggs (Biggs 1998) developed an analysis that the basic unit of
Māori speech is the phrase, rather than the word. The lexical word
forms the "base" of the phrase. "Nouns" include those bases that
can take a definite article, but cannot occur as the nucleus of a
verbal phrase; for example:
ika (fish) or
rākau
(tree). Plurality is usually marked only by the definite article
(singular
te, plural
ngā). Some nouns lengthen a
vowel in the plural, such as
wahine (woman);
wāhine (women).
Statives serve as bases usable as verbs but not available for
passive use, such as
ora, alive,
tika, correct.
Grammars generally refer to them as "stative verbs". When used in
sentences, statives require different syntax than other verb-like
bases.
Locative bases can follow the locative particle
ki (to, towards) directly, such as
runga, above,
waho, outside, and placenames (
ki Tamaki, to
Auckland).
Personal bases take the personal article
a after
ki, such as names of people (
ki a
Hohepa, to Joseph), personified houses, personal pronouns,
wai? who? and
Mea, so-and-so.
Particles
Like all Polynesian languages, Māori has a rich array of particles.
These include verbal particles, pronouns, locative particles,
definitives and possessives.
Verbal particles indicate aspectual properties of the verb they
relate to. They include
ka (inceptive),
i (past),
kua(perfect),
kia (desiderative),
me
(prescriptive),
e (non-past),
kei (warning,
“lest”),
ina or
ana (punctative-conditional, "if
and when"), and
e … ana (imperfect).
Pronouns have singular, dual and plural number. Different
first-person forms in the dual and in the plural express groups
either inclusive or exclusive of the listener.
Locative particles refer to position in time and/or space, and
include
ki (towards),
kei (at),
i (past
position), and
hei (future position).
Possessives fall into one of two classes marked by
a and
o, depending on the dominant versus subordinate
relationship between possessor and possessed, so
ngā tamariki a
te matua, the children of the parent, but
te matua o ngā
tamariki, the parent of the children.
Definitives include the articles
te (singular) and
ngā (plural) and the possessives
tā and
tō. These also combine with the pronouns. Demonstratives
have a deictic function, and include
tēnei, this (near
me),
tēnā, that (near you),
tērā, that (far from
us both), and
taua, the aforementioned. Other definitives
include
tēhea? (which?), and
tētahi, (a
certain).Definitives that begin with
t form the plural by
dropping the
t:
tēnei (this),
ēnei
(these).
Personal pronouns
Like other Polynesian languages, Māori has three
numbers for pronouns and possessives:
singular,
dual and plural.
For example:
ia (he/she),
rāua (they two),
rātou (they, three or more). The dual and plural suffixes
are modern reflexes of historical words
rua and
toru. Māori pronouns and possessives further distinguish
exclusive "we" from inclusive "we", second and third. It has the
plural pronouns:
mātou (we, exc),
tātou (we,
inc),
koutou (you),
rātou (they). The language
features the dual pronouns:
māua (we two, exc),
tāua (we two, inc),
kōrua (you two),
rāua (they two). The difference between
exclusive and inclusive lies the treatment of the
person addressed.
Mātou refers to the speaker and others
but not the person or persons spoken to (
i.e., "I and some
others, but not you"), while
tātou refers to the speaker,
the person or persons spoken to, and everyone else (
i.e.,
"you and I and others"). Examples:
- Tēnā koe: hello (to one person)
- Tēnā kōrua: hello (to two people)
- Tēnā koutou: hello (to more than two people)
Syntax
Qualifiers generally follow nouns.
Calendar
From missionary times, Māori used transliterations of English names
for days of the week and for months of the year. Since about 1990
the Māori Language Commission / Te Taura Whiri o te Reo Māori has
promoted new ("traditional") sets. Its days of the week have no
pre-European equivalent but reflect the pagan origins of the
English names (for example, Hina = moon), the months of the year on
one regional traditional calendar which, being lunar, does not
quite match the Julian/Gregorian months.
| Day |
Transliteration |
Official |
| Monday |
Mane |
Rāhina |
| Tuesday |
Tūrei |
Rātū |
| Wednesday |
Wenerei |
Rāapa |
| Thursday |
Tāite |
Rāpare |
| Friday |
Paraire |
Rāmere |
| Saturday |
Rāhoroi/Hāterei |
Rāhoroi |
| Sunday |
Rātapu/Wiki |
Rātapu |
| Month |
Transliteration |
Official |
| January |
Hānuere |
Kohi-tātea |
| February |
Pēpuere |
Hui-tanguru |
| March |
Māehe |
Poutū-te-rangi |
| April |
Āperira |
Paenga-whāwhā |
| May |
Mei |
Haratua |
| June |
Hune |
Pipiri |
| July |
Hūrae |
Hōngongoi |
| August |
Ākuhata |
Here-turi-kōkā |
| September |
Hepetema |
Mahuru |
| October |
Oketopa |
Whiringa-ā-nuku |
| November |
Noema |
Whiringa-ā-rangi |
| December |
Tīhema |
Hakihea |
See also
Footnotes
- New Zealand Maori Council v Attorney-General [1994] 1 NZLR
513
- Biggs, Bruce (1994). "Does Māori have a closest relative?" In
Sutton (Ed.)(1994), pp. 96-105
- Clark, Ross (1994). "Moriori and Māori: The Linguistic
Evidence". In Sutton (Ed.)(1994), pp. 123-135.
- Harlow, Ray (1994). "Māori Dialectology and the Settlement of
New Zealand". In Sutton (Ed.)(1994), pp. 106-122.
- (revised 2007)
- Bauer 1993: 537. Bauer mentions that Biggs 1961 announced a
similar finding.
- Bauer 1997: 536. Bauer even raised the possibility of analysing
Māori as really having six vowel phonemes, /a, ā, e, i, o, u/.
- Harlow 1996: 1; Bauer 1997: 534
- Bauer 1997: 532 lists seven allophones (variant
pronunciations).
- Biggs 1988: 65
- Bauer 1997: xxvi
- "Most of the tribal variation in grammar is a matter of
preferences: speakers of one area might prefer one grammatical form
to another, but are likely on occasion to use the non-preferred
form, and at least to recognise and understand it." Bauer 1993:
xxi-xxii
References
- Biggs, Bruce (1994). Does Māori have a closest
relative? In Sutton (ed.)(1994), pp. 96–105.
- Biggs, Bruce (1998). Let's Learn Māori. Auckland:
Auckland University Press.
- Biggs, Bruce. 1988. Towards the study of Maori dialects. In Ray
Harlow and Robin Hooper, eds. VICAL 1: Oceanic languages.
Papers from the Fifth International Conference on Austronesian
linguistics. Auckland, New Zealand. January
1988, Part I. Auckland: Linguistic Society of New
Zealand.
- Bauer, Winifred (1997). Reference Grammar of Māori.
Auckland: Reed.
- Bauer, Winifred. 1993. Maori. Routledge. Series:
Routledge descriptive grammars.
- Clark, Ross (1994). Moriori and Māori: The Linguistic
Evidence. In Sutton (ed.)(1994), pp. 123–135.
- Harlow, Ray. 1996. Maori. LINCOM Europa.
- Harlow, Ray (1994). Māori Dialectology and the Settlement
of New Zealand. In Sutton (ed.)(1994), pp. 106–122.
- Sutton, Douglas G. (ed.) (1994). The Origins of the First
New Zealanders. Auckland: Auckland University Press.
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