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 Tītori 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 Karāiti” for “Jesus Christ”, “korōria” for “glory”, “āmene” 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.
Other te reo transliterations include “pukapuka” for “book”, “tīketi” for “ticket”, “tiriti” for “street”, “kāwhe” for “coffee”, “kawhe” for “calf” and “harirū” for “handshake”, which apparently derives from “how do you do?”
The more recent approach is to create entirely new words and compounds, but some words and phrases have options, such as “mōrena” (a loan word) or “ata mārie” for “good morning”. Other te reo transliterations are appearing more, such as “Meri Kirihimete” for “Merry Christmas”.
NZ English has long borrowed from the language that came before it. Author Rudyard Kipling visited New Zealand in 1891 and wrote: “There is always the same assembly of men talking horse or business … At Wellington, overlooking the harbour (all right-minded clubs should command the sea), another, and yet a like, sort of men speak of sheep, the rabbits, the land courts, and the ancient heresies of Sir Julius Vogel; and their more expressive sentences borrow from the [Māori].”
NZ English speakers borrowed not only complete words and phrases, but also adaptations. Kipling remembered “the long drawled taihoo … of the Māori, which meant the same as ‘when they get around to it’ in Vermont.” This is from “taihoa”, meaning “wait” or “hold on” but often pronounced as “tie-ho” by English speakers. “Pukaroo-ed”, meaning “to break, destroy, ruin” (from “pakaru” meaning “broken”), was used from the 1840s, and was commonly heard among the nation’s wartime troops. It was probably employed because of its similarity to “buggered”. “Kit” from “kete” (basket), “futta” from “whata” (a raised storehouse), and “goori” from “kuri”(dog) were also once commonly used. There is also the odd portmanteau term such as “half-pie”, defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as “halfway towards, imperfect, mediocre”, while “ka pai”, a popular te reo phrase, means “good, well done” and “pie on” was slang during World War II for highly skilled or capable. Other portmanteaus have arisen, including, “zui” (short for “Zoom hui”) which emerged during the Covid-19 lockdowns.
Kia Ora
After a reported complaint, toll operator Naida Glavish was threatened with the sack for greeting callers to the Post Office with “Kia ora”. She was demoted, but eventually reinstated; the then-prime minister, Robert Muldoon, said Glavish could answer the phone however she liked as long as she didn’t give the Aussie greeting “Gidday, Blue”.
This was 1984, and an incident like this happening now is hard to believe, though in 2022 a teenage worker in Havelock North McDonalds was asked to curb his use of te reo greetings by his manager (who was apparently also Māori).
The Kia Ora Incident of 1984, which has its own Wikipedia page, is regarded as a key moment in the revitalisation of te reo Māori. Glavish, who said she had received a message from her deceased grandmother to stick to her guns, was subsequently made a dame for services to Māori and the community. Te reo Māori was made an official language three years later, as was NZ Sign Language in 2006 (English remains a de facto language, though attempts have been made to make it official).
In the four decades since, te reo is in much better health thanks to pressure from activists like Glavish and Sir Pou Temara and, in part, to greater regard for Treaty of Waitangi obligations to protect it. Te reo Māori is said to be spoken by more than 180,000 people (whether fluently or speaking and understanding it to some degree), and hundreds of loan words are used every day.
Analysis in the 1990s found about six loan words per 1000 words. By 2006, a study of newspaper reports found that number had reached nearly eight words per 1000, and by 2018, the number was as high as 35 per 1000. It is likely to have increased again as Māori media and state-owned channels employ a far greater number of terms, particularly in newsreading – either standalone words or complete phrases. Increasingly, places, animals and public bodies are referred to by their te reo names. Government advertising is now often bilingual, eg, the Covid-19 campaign “Don’t be a tero, get the wero”, which roughly translates to “Don’t be an ass, get the jab”, while some mixed sayings are more organic: “Less hui, more do-ey”.
Te reo terms such as “aroha” (love), “hangi” (food cooked in an earth oven; earth oven), “tangi” (funeral; mourning), “haka” (posture dance), “iwi” (tribe), “whānau” (family group) and “kai” (food) are known to most Kiwis. Many more, such as “mokopuna” (grandchild), “tikanga” (traditional practices), “whakamā” (shame) and “motu” (island/country), are entering general speech.
Newer introductions, such as “ākonga” (school student), “pūtea” (money), “pōrangi” (crazy) or “whakawhanaungatanga” (process of establishing relationships), will not be understood by many English speakers in Aotearoa. This may change as more children are educated entirely in te reo or given a strong grounding in basic terms within the state system, and as the growth of adult te reo education continues. An indication of widespread use is when a word is no longer glossed, ie, its meaning explained, though the media can lead by example here, too.
One side effect of this adoption is that some te reo terms seem to be used in certain contexts with specific meanings that don’t apply in te reo, eg, “puku”(stomach) often refers to a pot belly, “hīkoi” (walk, march) to a protest walk and “aroha” to a kind of loving compassion. A few words in te reo are used within English constructions in conversation, eg, “She whakapapas to that iwi”, “He was whangai-ed out as a child”, “Have you ever been pukana-ed?”.
Given the survival of te reo despite significant challenges, which has been aided by a small group of determined education stalwarts and events like 1972’s Māori Language Petition to advocate for more te reo in schools, some speakers object to any use outside of standard Māori grammar and punctuation. This compares to the relatively laissez-faire approach of modern English. Although codification and the creation of new words by Te Taura Whiri i te Reo Māori – the Māori Language Commission is likely to aid its survival, this tension between te reo as a taonga (treasure) and a language of the 21st century is likely to continue.
Regardless, the world now knows how to greet Kiwis. Even the astronauts in the space station say “Kia ora to all in Aotearoa New Zealand” as they fly past 400km above.
Macron
What’s in a macron? Quite a lot, it seems. A macron indicates that a vowel sound is long, but not only is the sound different, the meaning is often different, too. “Manu” means “bird”, “mānu” means “floating”; “keke” means “cake”, “kēkē” means “armpit”; “wētā” are insects, “weta” means “excrement”. So, macrons (“tohutō” in te reo, meaning a sign that stretches) are important.
The Kāpiti Coast District Council erected two haere mai (welcome) signs and someone repeatedly spray-painted over the macron on the “ā”. When it was decided in 2010 to include the macrons, the move was opposed by some councillors, one calling it “PC gone mad”. The “macron meddler”, as a Stuff news story inevitably dubbed the person, was involved in “the sort of bored, low-IQ vandalism we expect around school holidays”, said Kāpiti Coast mayor K Gurunathan, which makes one wonder what high-IQ vandalism might look like. The macron was reinstated at least six times within 18 months. This may be due to the fact that place names have sentimental value for some people and any change is unacceptable (there was gnashing of teeth among some locals when “Wanganui” acquired an “h” to reflect Ngāti Hau dialect), or it may be simply because a spray can-wielding vandal was bored around school holidays.
Many placenames, from Manawatū to Paekākāriki, Whangārei and Ōamaru, demand a macron, and excluding them actually makes them orthographically incorrect. As Tuehu Harris, the acting chief executive of Te Taura Whiri i te Reo Māori, said after one sign attack, taking a macron away from a te reo word was a bit like removing the dot of an “i” or the cross of a “t”. Non-speakers had been mispronouncing te reo because of the lack of a macron. The alternative, preferred by some iwi and hapū, is to double the vowels for long sounds (“Maaori” rather than “Māori”).
Even though the commission had been urging the use of macrons for decades, mainstream media didn’t introduce their common use – or their pronunciations – until about 2017. For some, there were technical and logistical issues to sort out, but when it happened it was well overdue, despite the fact that NZ English seldom uses such diacritical marks, though it arguably needs them. It was also seen as an important step in the media taking te reo Māori seriously as a national language of the country. A few other languages, like Hawaiian and the Romanised version of Japanese, also use macrons to indicate when a vowel sound is longer. But who knows, maybe we’ll see it sneak into other areas – “thō” or “thrū”, anyone?
