Kiwi kupu

A new book about language in Aotearoa reveals the two-way trade in words that exists between te reo Māori and NZ English.

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In his upcoming book, 100 Words That Make Us Kiwi, the Listener's books editor Mark Broatch not only investigates the etymology of Kiwi vernacular - sweet as, egg, bro - and the backstory of Godzone (going bush and rattling your dags), but also the interweaving of te reo Māori with New Zealand English. In this extract, he writes of the evolution of distinctly New Zealand language, how a toll operator's “Kia ora” kick-started a movement, and the place of the macron.

BORROW

English and Māori have borrowed heavily from one another since Europeans first arrived.

Thanks to missionaries like Thomas Kendall, academics including Samuel Lee, and Māori rangatira such as Titori and Hongi Hika, vocabulary and grammar guides to the local language were created. The books of the Bible were some of the first to be translated (mainly using Ngāpuhi dialect), and while much could be translated directly from te reo, transliterations or loan words of some concepts and terms were employed, for example: “Ihu Karaiti” for “Jesus Christ”, “korōria” for “glory”, “amene” for “amen” and “rēwera” for “devil”. It is said that early Māori avidly embraced literacy and taught each other to read and write. In the early 19th century, it's likely a higher proportion of the Māori population were literate than the new arrivals.

Because te reo employs a smaller Latin alphabet and fewer sounds than English and likes to end syllables and words on a vowel sound, adjustments had to be made. Apart from “wh” for an “f” sound, diagraphs such as “ng” (combinations of two letters representing one sound) were replaced by a single consonant. Māori vowels come in short and long forms, the latter indicated by a macron, and letters that didn't feature in Māori, including “b”, “s” and “v”, were replaced.