Prestige norms and sound change in Māori

2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 95-114
Author(s):  
Jeanette King ◽  
Margaret Maclagan ◽  
Ray Harlow ◽  
Peter Keegan ◽  
Catherine Watson

Abstract 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.

Author(s):  
Anna K Rolleston ◽  
Judy Bowen ◽  
Annika Hinze ◽  
Erina Korohina ◽  
Rangi Matamua

We describe a collaboration between Māori (Indigenous people of Aotearoa/New Zealand) and Tauiwi (non-Māori) researchers on a software engineering project. Te Tiriti o Waitangi (The Treaty of Waitangi) provides the basis for Māori to lead research that involves Māori as participants or intends to impact Māori outcomes. Through collaboration, an extension of the traditional four-step software design process was created, culminating in a nine-step integrated process that included Kaupapa Māori (Māori ideology) principles. The collaboration experience for both Māori and Tauiwi highlighted areas of misunderstanding within the research context based on differing worldviews and our ability to navigate and work through this. This article provides context, guiding principles, and recommended research processes where Māori and Tauiwi aim to collaborate.


1999 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 19-41 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margaret A. Maclagan ◽  
Elizabeth Gordon ◽  
Gillian Lewis

In this article we address Labov's claim that sound changes that are not stigmatized are led especially by young women who are the “movers and shakers” in the community, people with energy and enterprise. Such young women, at the same time, are conservative with respect to sound changes or stable linguistic variables that are stigmatized. We investigated this claim by comparing the pronunciation of the non-stigmatized front vowels /I/, /ε/, and /æ/ with that of the stigmatized diphthongs /ai/ and /a[inverted omega]/ in New Zealand English. When we considered the pronunciation of each variable, the young women did not unequivocally support Labov's claim. However, when we examined the behavior of individual speakers across the two sets of variables, Labov's claim was supported. This result leads us to emphasize the importance of considering the behavior of individual speakers in a more holistic way rather than focusing only on the averaged data for single variables.


2017 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-34 ◽  
Author(s):  
Belinda Borell ◽  
Helen Moewaka Barnes ◽  
Tim McCreanor

Historical trauma is an important and growing area of research that provides crucial insights into the antecedents of current-day inequities in health and social wellbeing experienced by Indigenous people in colonial settler societies. What is not so readily examined is the flip side of historical trauma experienced by settlers and their descendants, what might be termed “historical privilege”. These historic acts of privilege for settlers, particularly those emigrating from Britain, provide the antecedents for the current-day realities for their descendants and the structural, institutional and interpersonal levels of advantage that are also a key feature of inequities between Indigenous and settler. This article theorises an explicit link between historical trauma and historical privilege and explores how the latter may be examined with particular reference to Aotearoa New Zealand. Three core elements of historical trauma are posited as a useful framework to apply to historical privilege.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Damian Scarf ◽  
Wetini Atutahi Rapana ◽  
Taylor Winter ◽  
Benjamin Riordan ◽  
Ririwai Fox ◽  
...  

Background: Previous work has demonstrated that cannabis laws have had a disproportionate impact on Māori, the Indigenous people of Aotearoa New Zealand. In an attempt to address this bias, the New Zealand Government amended cannabis laws in 2019, providing police with the power to determine whether a health-centred approach would be more beneficial than a conviction. In the current study, we use population level data to assess whether this law change has ameliorated the bias in cannabis convictions for Māori.Methods: Data were drawn from the Integrated Data Infrastructure (IDI), a large government database hosted by Aotearoa New Zealand’s national statistics office. After constructing the population in the IDI, and filtering down to those who 1) were between 18 and 65, 2) were Māori or Pākehā and, 3) had any cannabis charges that proceeded to the courts, we had a sample of over 2,000 individuals.Results: Māori ethnicity was a significant predictor of the likelihood of receiving a cannabis conviction for Māori males, with a marginal effect for Māori females. Further, there was no reduction in the number of cannabis charges before vs. after the amendment to cannabis laws.Conclusion: The current study demonstrates that the 2019 amendment has not ameliorated the bias in cannabis convictions for Māori. Given this, the New Zealand Government must follow other countries around the world and move forward on cannabis law reform.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
M Gubian ◽  
J Harrington ◽  
M Stevens ◽  
F Schiel ◽  
Paul Warren

Copyright © 2019 ISCA The focus of the study is the application of functional principal components analysis (FPCA) to a sound change in progress in which the SQUARE and NEAR falling diphthongs are merging in New Zealand English. FPCA approximated the trajectory shapes of the first two formant frequencies (F1/F2) in a large acoustic database of read New Zealand English speech spanning three different age groups and two regions. The derived FPCA parameters showed a greater degree of centralisation and monophthongisation in SQUARE than in NEAR. Compatibly with the evidence of an ongoing sound change in which SQUARE is shifting towards NEAR, these shape differences were more marked for older than for younger/mid-age speakers. There was no effect of region nor of place of articulation of the preceding consonant; there was a trend for the merger to be more advanced in low frequency words. The study underlines the benefits of FPCA for quantifying the many types of sound changes involving subtle shifts in speech dynamics. In particular, multi-dimensional trajectory shape differences can be quantified without the need for vowel targets nor for determining the influence of the parameters - in this case of the first two formant frequencies - independently of each other.


2008 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 125-144 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alison Jones ◽  
Kuni Jenkins

Following Judith Butler's idea of “materialization,” the authors consider the effects of three different approaches to historical information about the educational relationship between indigenous and settler peoples. As a part of an argument about how one might legitimately study the establishment of such a relationship and take seriously the viewpoint of the indigenous people, the authors asks what it becomes possible to think when we eschew popular “multiple discourses” in favour of a strategic engagement with a post-interpretivist empiricism. The authors — respectively descendants of white settlers and indigenous Māori — focus on a material reality not present in the archives recording the initial interactions between the indigenous people and the first permanent British settlers in New Zealand.


Author(s):  
Coll Thrush ◽  
Kate Shanley ◽  
Ned Blackhawk

This book provides an imaginative retelling of London's history, framed through the experiences of Indigenous travelers who came to the city over the course of more than five centuries. London is famed both as the ancient center of a former empire and as a modern metropolis of bewildering complexity and diversity. This book offers an imaginative vision of the city's past crafted from an almost entirely new perspective: that of Indigenous children, women, and men who traveled there, willingly or otherwise, from territories that became Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and the United States, beginning in the sixteenth century. They included captives and diplomats, missionaries and shamans, poets and performers. Some, like the Powhatan noblewoman Pocahontas, are familiar; others, like an Odawa boy held as a prisoner of war, have almost been lost to history. In drawing together their stories and their diverse experiences with a changing urban culture, the book also illustrates how London learned to be a global, imperial city and how Indigenous people were central to that process.


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