Researchers say te reo Maori could be shedding vowels as pronunciation of the language changes. And while that is troubling for some, they say it is a sign of a living language.
Native speakers have long bemoaned the changing state of te reo. Associate Professor Jeanette King of Canterbury University led a team of researchers comparing Radio New Zealand and TVNZ archival recordings of men born in the 1880s who were interviewed in the 1940s with kaumatua of today and people born in the 1980s, to see if they could quantify changes.
The project found that the long vowel sounds, a,e,i,o,u, which generally are twice the sound of short vowels a, e, i, o, u, were getting shorter. For the three groups the short sound was measured at 60 milliseconds. The long sounds from the 1940s material typically measured twice as long, but the long sounds spoken by modern kaumatua and young people recorded dramatic decreases in length.
Measurement changes for u and i were the most affected.
The analysis revealed that te reo Maori could eventually have only six vowel sounds - the long a is likely to be retained while the rest of the long vowels may go the way of the moa. Losing the vowels was not likely to lead to confusion, Professor King said.
The way second-language learners spoke English was also having an effect on spoken te reo.
"One you always hear, and I get annoyed with my students, is waahi which is said wahi, or timata is pretty much said timata nowadays.
"The point here is that we don't have that short/long distinction in our English vowels. Some vowels are produced a little longer but we just don't have that same sort of pairs of vowels."
Diphthongs, where two vowels are put together for sounds such as ae, and ai, were getting harder to differentiate, so the sounds for ae [yes] and pai [good] sounded the same from some speakers. Rhythms of speech were also changing.
The research paper noted that such was the concern from pockets of kaumatua that some had noted it might be better for the "beautiful" language to die.
"However, the attitudes of older speakers tells us this: If it really didn't matter about how we pronounced a language, older generations wouldn't bother commenting about it. The way we pronounce a language says a lot about who we are."
Professor King said "most of us do like to hear an older person speaking, because we do appreciate the lovely way they sound", but change was a reality for all living languages.
Maori had the capacity to absorb this and thrive, she said, but as a way of positively addressing concerns, her team was developing pronunciation aids modelled on native speakers.
- New Zealand Herald