Publications
Publication details [#50747]
Maclagan, Margaret A., Ray Harlow, Peter Keegan, Jeanette King and Catherine I. Watson. 2009. The changing sound of the Māori language. In Preston, Dennis R. and James N. Stanford, eds. Variation in Indigenous Minority Languages. (IMPACT: Studies in Language and Society 25). John Benjamins. pp. 129–152.
Publication type
Article in book
Publication language
English
Keywords
Language as a subject
Place, Publisher
John Benjamins
Annotation
Māori is the indigenous language of New Zealand. Its increasingly close contact with English over the last 150 years led to its endangerment, though it is now subject to active revitalization efforts. This paper reports on some results from the MAONZE (Māori and New Zealand English) Research Project, which is studying aspects of the mutual influence of Māori and English in the area of pronunciation. Three groups of male speakers are analyzed, with birth dates ranging over 100 years (1880s to 1980s). Acoustic analyses of vowels and diphthongs are presented together with analyses of the stop consonants and /f/ (). The results show that there has been considerable change in all the analyzed aspects of Māori pronunciation. Some changes could reflect language-internal change, but since they relate closely to similar changes that have taken place in New Zealand English over the same time period, they probably also represent external influence.