Ray Harlow

Sound change in Māori and the Influence of New Zealand English

This article investigates sound change in the vowels of Māori, the indigenous language of New Zealand. It examines the relationship between sound changes in Māori and in New Zealand English, the more dominant language, with which Māori has been in close contact for nearly 200 years. We report on the analysis of three adult speaker groups whose birth dates span 100 years. All speakers were bilingual in Māori and New Zealand English. In total the speech of 31 men and 31 women was investigated. Analysis was done on the first and second formant values, extracted from the vowel targets. There has been considerable movement in the Māori vowel space. We find that the sound change in the Māori monophthongs can be directly attributed to the impact of New Zealand English, however the situation for the diphthongs is not so clear cut. There is some evidence that both New Zealand English monophthongs and diphthongs are impacting on the Māori diphthongs, but so too are the Māori monophthongs. We conclude that although New Zealand English has had a strong influence on Māori, there is very strong evidence that new generations of speakers of Māori are acquiring a phonemic system with its own internal parameters and consistencies.

The MAONZE project: Changing uses of an indigenous language database

Abstract The MAONZE (Māori and New Zealand English) database consists of audio recordings that have been collected for the purpose of analyzing sound change over time in the Māori language. The database contains the Māori and English speech of nearly 70 male and female speakers of different age groups from a range of tribal areas. The time depth of the database is provided by the speech of 18 men and women born in the late 19th century and recorded in the mid to late 20th century. This paper describes the database and discusses issues surrounding its creation and use.

Interrupted Transmission and Rule Loss in Māori: The Case of ka

The Māori tense/aspect marker ka has historically two allomorphs: one, /ka:/, which is used when the rest of the verb phrase consists of only two morae, and the other, /ka/, for longer phrases. Recordings of native speakers born toward the end of the nineteenth century show that this distribution was at that time observed with a high degree of consistency. However, more recent speaker groups show variable behavior in this respect, with modern younger speakers tending to show abandonment of the allomorphy in favor of consistent use of the short form. This shift is attributable both to a proportional increase in the use of longer phrases over the same period and to the decreasing use of Māori generally, so that opportunities to acquire the inherited rule have diminished considerably.

Ngā Nekehanga o te Whakahua i te Reo Māori i roto i te Rautau kua Hipa nei

Māori and English have been in increasing contact within New Zealand for over 200 years. The impact of each language on the other in vocabulary, which has been borrowed in both directions, is clear. More subtle is the mutual influence in the area of pronunciation. The MAONZE project has been investigating changes in the pronunciation of Māori and of the English of speakers of Māori, using recordings of seven kaumātua born in the 19th century who were interviewed by the Mobile Unit of Radio New Zealand in the 1940s (referred to in the text as the TK group), of ten kaumātua alive today (K), and of ten younger speakers (T). This paper describes our methodology and reports the results of the investigation of the long and short vowels of Māori as well as of some diphthongs. These were all studied acoustically, that is to say, using computers to analyse the sound waves characteristic of each sound. For each vowel and diphthong, and for each speaker, we attempted to analyse thirty examples, though some sounds are relatively rare, such as /ī/ and /ao/, so that this target could not always be achieved. The analysis did indeed find that there had been shifts in the pronunciation of these sounds over the three generations of speakers in the study. Except for the distinction between /a/ and /ā/, the length and qualitative difference between the historical long and short vowels is decreasing. Most striking is the shift in /u/ and /ū/ to a much more forward position in the mouth, a change which parallels movement in English. The five diphthongs studied were /au, ou, ao, ai, ae/, all of which are clearly distinct in the speech of the TK and K groups, but which are tending to merge to three in the younger group, who no longer distinguish tae and tai or hau and hou so clearly. Within the T group, we distinguished between those who had been speaking Māori since birth (R1), and those who had acquired good Māori at school or later (R2). It turned out that in all the changes taking place, the R2-T group is leading the way, and is thus probably the direction the language will take into the future, particularly as the majority of younger speakers of Māori these days belong to this category.

Investigating the Sound Change in the New Zealand English Nurse Vowel /ᴈ:/

Although there have been many studies of New Zealand English (NZE) vowels, little has been written about the nurse vowel /ɜ:/. This study uses data from three groups of Māori speakers of NZE born between 1871 and 1992 to analyse changes to the nurse vowel over time. Although all these speakers are bilingual in English and Māori, we show that they are representative of NZE speakers generally. Analyses are carried out on formant frequency, vowel length, lip-rounding and vocal tract shape. The vowel space position measure (VSM) is used to analyse first and second formant movements together. The nurse vowel in NZE has risen so that it is now close and front in the vowel space, and apparently in danger of being confused with the goose vowel. We conclude by considering the factors that apparently keep the vowels apart and the potential effects of such a merger.