Prestige norms and sound change in Māori
Māori, the threatened language of the indigenous people of New Zealand, has been undergoing revitalisation since
the 1970s. The MAONZE project (Māori and New Zealand English) has studied sound change in Māori by comparing the speech of
historical elders, present-day elders and young speakers. Here we analyse the read speech from nine present-day elders and twelve
young speakers and compare it with the results from our previous analysis of their conversational material to investigate whether
style shift occurs in more careful Māori speech. Pronunciation change was restricted to the backing of long /u:/, a sound whose
fronting had been stigmatised and of which older female speakers seemed to be particularly aware. We conclude that, although there
is some indication of style-shift in the read material, ‘first wave’ (
Eckert 2012)
sociolinguistic methodology is not appropriate for Māori speakers whose notion of class and prestige differ from that of
previously articulated sociolinguistic norms.
Article outline
- 1.Background
- 2.Methodology
- 3.Sound change in Māori
- 4.Prestige norms
- 5.Analysis of interview and reading styles
- 6.Discussion and conclusion
- Notes
-
References
References (53)
References
Anderson, Atholl. 2015. Ancient
origins 3000 BC- AD 1300. In Atholl Anderson, Judith Binney and Aroha Harris eds. Tangata
Whenua: A History. Auckland: Bridget Williams Books. 3–29.
Barrington, John M., and Timothy H. Beaglehole. 1974. Māori
Schools in a Changing Society. Wellington: New Zealand Council for Educational Research.
Bell, Allan. 2016. Succeeding
waves: Seeking sociolinguistic theory for the twenty-first
century. In Nicolas Coupland, ed. Sociolinguistics:
Theoretical Debates. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 391–416.
Benton, Richard A. 1991. The Māori Language: Dying or
Reviving? Honolulu: East West Center (Reprinted by New Zealand Council for Educational Research in
1997).
Boersma, Paul and David Weenink. 2009. Praat:
doing phonetics by computer (Version 6.0.29) [Computer
program]. Accessed August 12,
2019, from [URL]
Cheshire, Jenny. 1982. Variation
in an English Dialect. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.
Chirkova, Katia, James N. Stanford, and Dehe Wang. 2018. A
long way from New York City: socially stratified contact-induced phonological convergence in Ganlo Ersu (Sichuan,
China). Language Variation and
Change 301: 109–145.
Eckert, Penelope. 2012. Three
waves of variation study: The emergence of meaning in the study of sociolinguistic
variation. Annual Review of
Anthropology 411: 87–100.
Eckert, Penelope. 2019. The
limits of mening: Social indexicality, variation, and the cline of
interiority. Language 95(4): 751–776.
Fishman, Joshua A. 1991. Reversing Language Shift: Theoretical
and Empirical Foundations of Assistance to Threatened
Languages. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.
Gordon, Elizabeth, Lyle Campbell, Jennifer Hay, Margaret Maclagan, Andrea Sudbury, and Peter Trudgill. 2004. New
Zealand English: Its Origins and
Evolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Harlow, Ray. 2007. Māori:
A Linguistic Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Harlow, Ray, Peter J. Keegan, Jeanette King, Margaret Maclagan and Catherine I. Watson. 2005. Te whakahuatanga i te reo Māori : Kua ahatia e tātou i roto i ngā tau 100 kua hipa
nei? [The pronunciation of Māori: What have we done to it in the last 100
years?]. He puna Kōrero – Journal of Maori and Pacific
Development 6(1): 45–57. ISSN 1175–3099.
Harlow, Ray, Peter J. Keegan, Jeanette King, Margaret Maclagan and Catherine I. Watson. 2009. The
changing sound of the Māori language. In J. N. Stanford and D. R. Preston eds. Quantitative
Sociolinguistic Studies of Indigenous Minority
Languages. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company. 129–152.
Harlow, Ray, Winifred Bauer, Margaret Maclagan, Catherine I. Watson, Peter J. Keegan and Jeanette King. 2011. Interrupted
transmission and rule loss in Māori: The case of ka
. Oceanic
Linguistics 50(1): 51–65.
Hay, Jennifer, Margaret Maclagan and Elizabeth Gordon. 2008. New
Zealand English. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Holmes, Janet. 1997a. Maori
and Pakeha English: Some New Zealand social dialect data. Language in
Society 26(1): 65–101.
Keegan, Peter J., Catherine I. Watson, Jeanette King, Margaret Maclagan and Ray Harlow. 2012. The
role of technology in measuring changes in the pronunciation of Māori over
generations. In T. Ka’ai, M. O. Laoire, N. Ostler, R. Ka’ai-Mahuta, D. Mahuta and T. Smith eds. Language
Endangerment in the 21st Century: Globalisation, Technology and New Media, Proceedings of Conference FEL
XVI. AUT University, Auckland, New Zealand: Te Ipukarea – The National Māori Language Institute, AUT University/Foundation for Endangered Languages. 65–71.
King, Jeanette. 2018. Māori:
Revitalization of an endangered language. In Kenneth Rehg and Lyle Campbell, eds. The
Oxford Handbook of Endangered Languages. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 592–612.
King, Jeanette, Ray Harlow, Catherine I. Watson, Peter J. Keegan and Margaret Maclagan. 2009. Changing
pronunciation of the Māori language: Implications for
revitalization. In Jon Reyhner and Louise Lockard, eds. Indigenous
Language Revitalization: Encouragement, Guidance & Lessons Learned Copyright © 2009 by Northern Arizona University [URL] Flagstaff, Arizona: Northern Arizona University. 85–96. [URL] (accessed 27 June 2019).
King, Jeanette, Margaret Maclagan, Ray Harlow, Peter J. Keegan and Catherine I. Watson. 2010a. The
MAONZE corpus: Establishing a corpus of Maori speech. New Zealand Studies in Applied
Linguistics 16(2): 1–16.
King, Jeanette, Margaret Maclagan, Ray Harlow, Peter J. Keegan and Catherine I. Watson. 2011a. The
MAONZE corpus: Transcribing and analysing Māori speech. New Zealand Studies in Applied
Linguistics 17(1): 32–48.
King, Jeanette, Margaret Maclagan, Ray Harlow, Peter J. Keegan and Catherine I. Watson. 2011b. The
MAONZE project: changing uses of an indigenous language database. Corpus Linguistics and
Linguistic
Theory 7(1): 37–57.
King, Jeanette, Catherine I. Watson, Margaret Maclagan, Ray Harlow, and Peter J. Keegan. 2010b. Māori
women‘s role in sound change. In J. Holmes and M. Marra eds. Femininity,
Feminism and Gendered Discourse. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. 191–211.
Krupa, Viktor. 1982. The
Polynesian Languages: A Guide (Languages of Asia and Africa
4). London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Labov, William. 1966. The
Social Stratification of English in New York City. Washington D. C.: Center for Applied Linguistics.
Labov, William. 1972. Sociolinguistic
Patterns. Oxford: Blackwell.
Labov, William. 1994. Principles
of Linguistic Change, volume
1. Oxford: Blackwell.
Labov, William. 2001. Principles
of Linguistic Change, volume
2. Oxford: Blackwell.
Maclagan, Margaret A. and Elizabeth Gordon. 1996. Women’s
role in sound change: The case of two New Zealand closing diphthongs. New Zealand English
Journal 101: 5–9.
Maclagan, Margaret A. and Elizabeth Gordon. 1999. Data
for New Zealand social dialectology: The Canterbury Corpus. New Zealand English
Journal 131: 50–58.
Maclagan, Margaret A., Elizabeth Gordon, and Gillian Lewis. 1999. Women
and sound change: Conservative and innovative behaviour by the same speakers. Language
Variation and
Change 11(1): 19–41.
Maclagan, Margaret and Jennifer Hay. 2007. Getting
fed up with our feet: Contrast maintenance and the New Zealand English ‘short’ front
vowel shift. Language Variation and
Change 19(1): 1–25.
Maclagan, Margaret A. and Jeanette King. 2002. The
pronunciation of wh in Māori – a case study from the late nineteenth
century. Te
Reo 451: 45–63.
Maclagan, Margaret A. and Jeanette King. 2007. Aspiration
of Plosives in Māori: Change Over Time. Australian Journal of
Linguistics 27 (1): 81–96.
Maclagan, Margaret, Ray Harlow, Jeanette King, Peter J. Keegan and Catherine I. Watson. 2004. New
Zealand English influence on Māori pronunciation over time. Te
Reo 471: 7–27.
Maclagan, Margaret, Ray Harlow, Jeanette King, Peter J. Keegan and Catherine I. Watson. 2013. The
role of women in Māori sound change. In Yousif Elhindi and Theresa McGarry eds. Gender-linked
Variation across Languages. Champaign, Illinois: Common Ground. 5–21.
Maclagan, Margaret, Catherine I. Watson, Ray Harlow, Jeanette King and Peter J. Keegan. 2009a. /u/
fronting and /t/ aspiration in Māori and New Zealand English. Language Variation and
Change 21(2): 175–192. (Published
online by Cambridge University Press 08 July 2009).
Maclagan, Margaret, Catherine I. Watson, Jeanette King, Ray Harlow, Laura Thompson and Peter J. Keegan. 2009b. “Investigating
Changes in the Rhythm of Maori over time”, 10th Annual Conference of the International
Speech Communication Association: Interspeech
2009, Brighton, September
6–10. p 1531–1534, ISSN 1990-9772.
McFarland, Agnes. 2015. Te
Kākahu Whakataratara o Ngāi Tūhoe. PhD dissertation. Massey University. Available online at [URL]
Milroy, L. 1980. Language
and Social
Networks. Oxford: Blackwell
Pihama, Leonie. 2018. Colonization
and the importation of ideologies of race, gender, and class in
Aotearoa. In Elizabeth McKinley and Linda Tuhiwai Smith eds. Handbook
of Indigenous
Education. Singapore: Springer. 1–20.
R Core Team. 2017. R: A language and
environment for statistical computing. R Foundation for Statistical Computing, Vienna, Austria. Available
online: [URL]
Rewi, Poia. 2010. Whaikōrero. Auckland: Auckland University Press.
Salmond, Anne. 1975. Hui:
A Study of Māori Ceremonial Gatherings. Wellington: A.H & A.W. Reed.
Simon, Judith and Linda Tuhiwai Smith. 1998. The
Native Schools Cystem: Ngā Kura
Māori. Auckland: Auckland University Press.
Stoakes, Hywel, Catherine Watson, Peter Keegan, Margaret Maclagan, Jeanette King, Ray Harlow. 2019. The
Dynamics of Closing Diphthong Formant Trajectories in Te Reo Māori, Proceedings of the 19th
International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, Melbourne,
Australia, 989–993.
Stanford, James N. 2016. A call for more diverse sources
of data: variationist approaches in non-English contexts. Journal of
Sociolinguistics 20(4): 525–541.
Watson, Catherine I., Margaret Maclagan, Jeanette King, and Ray Harlow. 2008. The
English Pronunciation of Successive Groups of Maori Speakers. INTERSPEECH 2008 – 9th Annual
Conference of the International Speech Communication Association, Brisbane, Australia, September 22–26, 2008; ISCA Archive, [URL] Page 338–341.
Watson, Catherine I., Jeanette King, Stephen Bier, Margaret Maclagan, Ray Harlow, Laura Thomson and Peter J. Keegan. 2011. Prosodic
clues in language recognition: how much information do listeners need to identify Māori and
English. Te
Reo 541: 83–111.
Watson, Catherine I., Margaret M. Maclagan, Jeanette King, Ray Harlow and Peter J. Keegan. 2016. Sound
change in Māori and the influence of New Zealand English. Journal of the International Phonetic
Association 46(2): 185–218. Published
online: 28 March 2016.
Watson, Catherine I., Peter J. Keegan, Margaret Maclagan, Ray Harlow and Jeanette King. 2017. The
motivation and development of MPAi, a Māori Pronunication Aid. Proceedings of Interspeech
2017. International Speech Communication Association. Stockholm, Sweden, August 20–24, 2017. 2063–2067.
Cited by (1)
Cited by one other publication
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 10 august 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
Any errors therein should be reported to them.