Maori or te reo Maori,^[2] also commonly shortened to te reo (literally the language), is one of the official languages of New Zealand. An Eastern Polynesian language, it is closely related to Cook Islands Maori, 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 — Maori, English and New Zealand Sign Language. Maori gained this status with the passing of the Maori Language Act in 1987. Most government departments and agencies now have bilingual names, for example, the Department of Internal Affairs also uses the name Te Tari Taiwhenua, and some places such as local-government offices and public libraries display bilingual signs and use bilingual stationery. New Zealand Post recognises Maori place-names in postal addresses. Citizens may conduct their dealings with government agencies in Maori, but in practice this almost always requires interpreters, restricting its everyday use to the limited geographical areas of high Maori fluency, and to more formal occasions, such as during public consultation.

A 1994 ruling by the Privy Council^[3] in the UK 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 Maori Television, a service broadcast partly in Maori. On 28 March 2008 Maori Television launched its second channel, Te Reo. Te Reo is 100% Maori language with no advertising or subtitles featuring special tribal programming with a particular focus on new programming for the fluent audience.^[4] However, Maori is still considered an endangered language.

History

Detail from the carved ridgepole of a house

Maori came to New Zealand as Eastern Polynesians voyaging, most likely, from the area of the Cook Islands or from the Society Islands, in seagoing canoes — possibly double-hulled and probably sail-rigged. These Polynesian settlers probably arrived at about AD 1300. Their language and its dialects then developed in relative isolation until the 19th century.

Since about 1800 the Maori language has had a tumultuous history. It started this period in the position of 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 Maori in schools (possibly at the request of Maori leaders, who appreciated the value to their young people of fluent English — see Native Schools). Increasing numbers of Maori people learned English.

Until World War II (1939-1945) most Maori people still spoke Maori as a native language. Worship took place in Maori; it functioned as the language of Maori homes; Maori politicians conducted political meetings in Maori; and some literature and many newspapers appeared in Maori.

As late as the 1930s, some Maori parliamentarians suffered disadvantage because the Parliament's proceedings took place in English. From this period, the number of speakers of Maori began to decline rapidly. By the 1980s fewer than 20% of Maori spoke the language well enough to class as native speakers. Even many of those people no longer spoke Maori in the home. As a result, many Maori children failed to learn their ancestral language, and generations of non-Maori-speaking Maori emerged.

By the 1980s, Maori leaders began to recognize the dangers of the loss of their language, and initiated Maori-language recovery-programs such as the Kohanga Reo movement, which immersed infants in Maori from infancy to school age. There followed the founding of the Kura Kaupapa Maori, a primary school program in Maori.

Linguistic classification

The major subgroups of East Polynesian

Comparative linguists classify Maori 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 close relatives include Hawaiian, Marquesan (languages in the Marquesic subgroup), and the Rapa Nui language of Easter Island^[5][6][7] While all these Eastern Polynesian languages inter-relate very closely, they do not rank as dialects of a single language, but as languages in their own right that diverged over centuries, with limited mutual intelligibility. Nonetheless, Tupaia, a Tahitian travelling with Captain James Cook in 1769-1770, could communicate effectively with Maori. Subjectively, speakers of modern Maori 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

Over 100,000 people, nearly all of them of Maori descent, speak Maori — most extensively 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.^[8] According to the 2006 census, 131,613 Maori (23.7 percent) "could [at least] hold a conversation about everyday things in te reo Maori".^[8] In the same census, Maori speakers accounted for 4.2 per cent of the New Zealand population.

As indicated above, the level of competence in the language of self-reported Maori speakers remains unknown and variable — some speakers use Maori as their main home language, whereas many more use only a few words or phrases (passive bilingualism). Probably very few Maori monoglots exist^{[original research?]}, but a larger number will have spoken Maori before they learnt English, because:

• Maori still serves as a community language in some predominantly-Maori settlements in the Northland, Urewera and East Cape areas
• kohanga reo Maori-immersion kindergartens throughout New Zealand use Maori exclusively
• increasing numbers of Maori raise their families bilingually

Urbanisation after the Second World War led to widespread language shift from Maori predominance (with Maori the primary language of the rural whanau) to English predominance (English serving as the primary language in the Pakeha cities). Therefore, as of 2007, Maori-speakers almost always operated bilingually, with New Zealand English as either their first or second language.

The Maori diaspora also speaks the Maori language, most significantly in Australia, where census-data revealed it as the home-language of 5,504 persons in 2001^[9] — an increase of 32.5 per cent since 1996. This represents 7.5 per cent of the Maori community in Australia.

Orthography

The modern Maori alphabet has 20 letters and digraphs: A A E E H I I K M N O O P R T U U W NG and WH. ^[10] Attempts to write Maori words using the Roman alphabet began with Captain James Cook and other early explorers, with varying degrees of success. From 1814, missionaries also 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 would be He Korero no Aotearoa. The orthography of the written language was established in 1820 by Professor Samuel Lee of Cambridge University who worked with chief Hongi Hika and his junior relative Waikato. Professor Samuel's orthography is the system in use today, with only two major changes: the first distinguishes the bilabial fricative wh from the labio-velar w, and the second change, which did not happen until the late 20th century, saw the marking of long vowels with either double vowels (haangi) or a macron (hangi). The macron has become the generally accepted way of marking long vowels.

Orthographical matters aside, Maori embraced the exciting new concept of literacy enthusiastically, and missionaries reported in the 1820s that Maori 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 the cured skins of animals.

Long vowels

The alphabet devised at Cambridge University had a deficiency in that it did not mark vowel-length, which operates phonemically in Maori — meaning that varying lengths of vowels can change the meaning of words, as seen in the following examples:

• ata 'morning', ata 'carefully'
• mana 'prestige', mana 'for him/her'
• manu 'bird', manu 'float'
• o 'of', o 'provisions for a journey'

Maori themselves devised ways to mark vowel-length, sporadically at first. Occasional and inconsistent vowel-length markings occur even in 19th-century manuscripts written by Maori. These markings can include macron-like bars over vowels, or the doubling of the vowels. Nineteenth-century Maori-language newspapers show some sporadic use of macrons or other length-marking methods. Sir Apirana Ngata's Maori Grammar and Conversation (7th printing, dated 1953) uses macrons, but inconsistently. With the teaching of Maori at Universities since the 1960s a more systematic use of vowel-length marking came into play. At Auckland University, Professor Bruce Biggs (who had Ngati Maniapoto descent) promoted the use of double vowels (thus Maaori), and that became the standard at Auckland until Biggs died around 2000. The Maori Language Commission, established by the Maori Language Act 1987 as the authority for Maori spelling and orthography, promoted the use of macrons, as did other universities.

Phonology

In the vowel and consonant tables below, each cell contains a phonetic transcription above and the corresponding orthographic representation in bold below.

Vowels

Speakers use all vowel-pairs except uo, and all vowel sounds receive their full value, whether stressed or not, but final short vowels may get devoiced.

Consonants

While pronunciations vary, <wh> generally denotes a bilabial fricative [?], a sound comparable to that of an "f" articulated by putting the lips together as if to make a "w" sound; today the labiodental [f] also occurs, possibly as a result of influence from English.^[11] Maori <r>, a tap, [?], resembles the <r> in Spanish or the t in the American English pronunciation of "city".

Syllables

A syllable in Maori has the form (C)V(V): a vowel preceded by an optional consonant and followed by an optional vowel. Two consonants never appear together (ng and wh function as single consonants), syllables always end in a vowel, though some speakers may occasionally de-voice a final vowel. (These rules give rise to such transliterations as Perehipeteriana, "Presbyterian".) All possible CV combinations exist; though who. wo, wu and whu occur only in a few loan-words from English such as wuru, "wool" and whutuporo, "football".^[12]

Dialects

Linguists generally isolate three major dialect-divisions for the Maori language:

1. Western North Island
2. Eastern North Island
3. South Island

Within these broad divisions, regional variation occurs, and individual regions show tribal variations. The major differences occur in the pronunciation of words, variation of vocabulary, and idiom. Standard Maori derives from the language of the Nga Puhi and Waikato tribal areas, both parts of the Western North Island dialect-chain. A fluent speaker of Maori has no problem understanding other dialects of Maori, and learners of the language may be unable to discern the subtle differences between dialects.

In terms of grammar, according to Winifred Bauer, scholars generally detect

"very little evidence from the data collected that grammatical structures differ significantly from one area to the next. 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."^[13]

Bauer also notes that that vocabulary and pronunciation show more variation, but generally without raising barriers to communication.

North Island dialects

Regional variations involve some speakers in the Wanganui and Taranaki regions replacing h with a glottal stop and using a glottalised pronunciation of wh. In Tuhoe and the Eastern Bay of Plenty some speakers merge ng into n. This causes little ambiguity in practice. In parts of the Far North, wh resembles bilabial English wh (when speakers distinguish it from w).

South Island dialects

In the South Island some speakers merge ng and k. However this change did not occur in the whole of the tribal area, with the result that the tribal name Kai Tahu can also appear as Ngai Tahu, as it does in Acts of Parliament.

Until the last decade or so, authorities actively discouraged southern Maori in favour of standard (northern North Island) Maori, the only form used by government and by most institutions. The southern dialect has gained acceptance in recent years, however, leading to changes in the official names and translations of several southern places and institutions. New Zealand's highest mountain, known for centuries as Aoraki in southern-Maori dialects that merge ng with k, and as Aorangi by other Maori, later received the name "Mount Cook" (after Captain Cook). It now bears the official name Aoraki/Mount Cook and only this name may appear printed on maps and in official documents. Similarly, Dunedin's main research library, the Hocken Library, now has the name Te Uare Taoka o Hakena, rather than (northern) Te Whare Taonga o Hakena.

Grammar

[] Bases

Professor Bruce Biggs of the University of Auckland developed a grammar of Maori (Biggs 1998) which defines possible forms of the phrase, which he regards as the basic unit of Maori speech, rather than the word. The base or lexical word forms a central component of the phrase. Biggs further divides bases into nouns (universals, statives, locatives and personals) and particles (grammatical words: verbal particles, pronouns, locatives, possessives and definitives).

Nouns comprise bases that can take a definite article, but cannot occur as the nucleus of a verbal phrase; for example:ika (fish) or rakau (tree). Nouns usually keep the same form in both singular and plural: a change in the definite article from te (singular "the") to nga (plural "the") indicating the change of number. Some words lengthen a vowel in the plural, such as wahine (woman); wahine (women). Speakers can derive nouns from other bases by adding the suffixes -nga, -anga, -kanga, -manga, -ranga, -tanga or –whanga. A correspondence exists between the beginning of the passive suffix and that of the derived noun suffix, so inu drink, inumia, passive, inumanga, occasion of or thing for drinking, and tangi, weep, tangihia, passive, tangihanga, occasion for weeping.

Universals function as bases used passively, such as inu, drink, (inumia, be drunk — of a liquid), tangi, weep (tangihia, be wept over). The passive suffixes are -a, -ia, -ina, -hia, -kia, -mia, -na, -ngia, -ria, -tia and -whia. Each universal generally takes the same suffix. The passive may also be used imperatively, as in inumia! (drink it!).

Statives serve as bases that can be used as verbs but cannot be used passively, such as ora, alive, tika, correct. These are generally referred to as 'stative verbs'. When used in sentences, statives require different syntax than other verb-like bases. Locative bases are bases that 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, Maori 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, and 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, a and o, depending on the dominant versus subordinate relationship between possessor and possessed, so nga tamariki a te matua, the children of the parent, but te matua o nga tamariki, the parent of the children.

Definitives include the articles te (singular) and nga (plural) and the possessives ta and to. These also combine with the pronouns. Demonstratives have a deictic function, and include tenei, this (near me), tena, that (near you), tera, that (far from us both), and taua, the aforementioned. Other definitives include tehea? (which?), and tetahi, (a certain).Definitives that begin with t form the plural by dropping the t: tenei (this), enei (these).

Personal pronouns

Like other Polynesian languages, Maori has three numbers for pronouns and possessives: singular, dual and plural. For example: ia (he/she), raua (they two), ratou (they 3 or more). Etymologists can still discern the words rua (2) and toru (3) in endings of the dual and plural pronouns.

Maori has four distinctions in pronouns and possessives: first exclusive, first inclusive, second and third. It has the plural pronouns: matou (we, exc), tatou (we, inc), koutou (you), ratou (they). The language features the dual pronouns: maua (we two, exc), taua (we two, inc), korua (you two), raua (they two). The difference between exclusive and inclusive lies the treatment of the person addressed. Matou refers to the speaker and others but not the person or persons spoken to (i.e., "I and some others, but not you"), while tatou refers to the speaker, the person or persons spoken to, and everyone else (i.e., "You and I and others").

Speakers distinguish correct use of the numbers in all aspects of the language. For example, everyday greetings take different forms depending on the number of people greeted:

• Tena koe: hello (to one person)
• Tena korua: hello (to two people)
• Tena koutou: hello (to more than two people)

Syntax

Please help improve this section by expanding it. Further information might be found on the talk page or at requests for expansion. (June 2008)

Qualifiers generally follow nouns.

Calendar

From missionary times, Maori used transliterations of English names for days of the week and for months of the year. From about 1990, the Maori Language Commission / Te Taura Whiri o te Reo Maori 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.

See also

• Maori influence on New Zealand English
• Maori people
• Maori Language Week, celebrated in the last week of July

Footnotes

References

• Biggs, Bruce (1994). Does Maori have a closest relative? In Sutton (Ed.)(1994), pp. 96–-105.
• Biggs, Bruce (1998). Let's Learn Maori. Auckland: Auckland University Press.
• Bauer, Winifred (1997). Reference Grammar of Maori. Reed.
• Clark, Ross (1994). Moriori and Maori: The Linguistic Evidence. In Sutton (Ed.)(1994), pp. 123–-135.
• Harlow, Ray (1994). Maori 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.

External links

Maori language edition of Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

• Maori Language Act 1987
• korero.maori.nz Maori language educational resources
• Ethnologue report for Maori
• Maori Language Commission (sets definitive standards).
• English and Maori Word Translator, originally developed at the University of Otago.
• Ngata Maori–English English–Maori Dictionary from Learning Media; gives several options and shows use in phrases.
• Collection of historic Maori newspapers
• Maori Phonology
• maorilanguage.net Learn the basics of Maori Language with video tutorials
• Microsoft New Zealand Maori Keyboard
• Maori Language Week (NZHistory) - includes a history of the Maori language, the Treaty of Waitangi Maori Language claim and 100 words every New Zealander should know
• Huia Publishers, catalogue includes Tirohia Kimihia the world's first Maori monolingual dictionary for learners
• IMDb website; Maori language films
• Publications about Maori language from Te Puni Kokiri, the Ministry of Maori Development

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