Māori/Aotearoa English

Full project title: Exploring Māori/Aotearoa English from socio-cognitive and cultural linguistic perspectives 

Funding body: Austrian Science Fund (FWF, https://www.fwf.ac.at/en/)

Project number: P 36443-G

Grant DOI: 10.55776/P36443

Funding Program: Principal Investigator Projects

Duration: 3 years (1 May 2023 – 30 April 2026)

Principal investigator (PI): Marta Degani (ORCID: 0000-0003-2478-9870)

Project team: Nicole Imrich (Ph.D student), Maja Gajic (student assistant)

Collaborator: Alexander Onysko

International collaboration partners:

Andreea Calude (University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand)
Hineitimoana Greensill: (Independent researcher, New Zealand)
Jeanette King (Canterbury University, Christchurch, New Zealand)
Egon Stemle (Eurac Research, Italy)
Hēmi Whaanga (Massey University, Palmerston North, New Zealand)

Brief description

Wider research context
This project is located in the field of World Englishes (WEs) and sheds new light on Māori English (ME), the variety that is traditionally associated with the indigenous Māori population in the linguistic and cultural context of New Zealand (NZ). ME can be characterized as a post-colonial contact variety that co-exists with and is related to general New Zealand English (NZE) and that continues to be influenced by the current socio-cultural embedding of the Māori people, their culture and their language, Te Reo Māori, in NZ.

Objectives
The project explores potential differences in language use among young New Zealanders of different ethnicity (Māori and Pākehā ‘NZ Europeans’) and with diverse linguistic repertoires (monolinguals and bilinguals) by concentrating on the lexical-and cognitive semantic dimensions of language use. Based on the hypothesis that the diverse experience of Māori bilinguals can surface in their use of English when compared to Pākehā speakers of English, the project aims at disclosing Māori culturally specific contents in English, as evident in: a) topics and themes, b) loans, codeswitches and calques, c) figurative language and d) cultural conceptualizations.

Approach
Based on data gathered from a story-telling task involving 140 New Zealanders of Māori and non-Māori ethnicity, the project applies methods from cognitive sociolinguistics and cultural linguistics to focus on variation in the use of English among the different groups of New Zealanders. A particular focus of the analysis will be on the semantic dimension of language use while controlling for the variables of ethnicity and bilingualism.

Innovation
The project is in line with the latest developments in research on WEs and proposes a new approach that combines insights from cognitive sociolinguistics and cultural linguistics, two research frameworks that have only recently begun to be applied to the study of WEs.

The project will be based on the linguistic analysis of an entirely new and unique set of spoken data that was elicited from a story-telling task conducted with 4 groups of speakers that differ in terms of linguistic repertoires (monolinguals and bilinguals) and ethnic affiliation (Māori and non-Māori). A further major objective of the project is to gather this data in the New Zealand Stories Corpus, a specialized corpus of narrations which will be made freely available to the research community upon completion of the project.