FAQ about Māori Vocabulary

Most Māori dictionaries contain between 10,000 and 20,000 word entries.  If every Māori word that ever appeared in print was counted the number may reach 100,000. As with any major English dictionary, many words would not be known by fluent speakers.

Māori words can be divided into function words (i.e. grammatical words) and content (lexical) words. Function words in Māori are very short (none are more than two morae long). They include determiners and words used to indicate things like tense, aspect and mood. Content words, are all two or more morae in length. They include nouns, verbs, and adjectives etc. (i.e. open word classes).

There are other ways of classifying Māori vocabulary. Words are either traditional (Pre-European contact) or borrowed from other languages, mainly English. Words may have retained their traditional meanings and/or acquired new or additional meanings since coming into contact with English. Other words are neologisms (words deliberately created usually to fill a gap in a language).

The shortest function words are a, e, i, and o. These are pronounced short in certain sentence environments. The shortest (widely used) content word is u (which is pronounced long) ‘teat, firm, establish’.

There are small number of traditional Māori bases that are 3 morae long. These can be reduplicated and undergo affixation (prefixation and suffixation).

For example, whakamahanahanatanga can be derived from the term mahana ‘warm’.

whaka- is a highly productive causative prefix, added to mahana to derive whakamahana ‘make warm’

(whaka)mahana can be reduplicated to (whaka)mahanahana (to express plurality of subjects or objects).

The nominalising suffix -tanga can be added to produce whakamahanahanatanga.This translates as’the making warm of a number of things’.

I am unaware of any borrowing from English that is a longer than whakamahanahanatanga.

There are Māori compounds and proper nouns which are much longer.

The most frequent word is the function word te ‘the (singular)’. The most frequent content word  (based on current corpus work) is korero ‘talk, speech’. This can be a noun or verb. Another highly frequent word is haere ‘to go’.

Many English speakers have difficulty pronouncing ‘heuea‘.  This is pronounced as two syllables heu-ea. Many learners have difficulty with the ng sound (a velar nasal), especially word initially.

Yes, but not significantly.

Some examples include: tētahi ‘a, singular’, is pronounced as tētehi by some Tainui and Te Arawa speakers, and as wētahi by some speakers in eastern and central regions, and as ngētehi by some Tainui speakers.

In modern Māori, Northern speakers may use nō for ‘no’, some Tuhoe speakers use e hē for ‘no’, elsewhere kāore or one of its variants is used.

Many speakers in Western areas use pawa or paoa ‘smoke (i.e. from a fire)’. Ngāti Porou speakers use kauruki, elsewhere au or auahi is used.

(Ngāti Porou, Tainui, Te Arawa, Tuhoe are names of Māori tribal groupings)

Since the late 1980s, most new words in Māori have been created or approved by New Zealand’s Māori Language Commission (Te Taura Whiri) who have developed their own set of guidelines.

Before the 1980s words were mainly borrowed from English. All borrowings conform to Māori phonological rules (i.e. they must be pronounced using existing Māori consonants, vowels, and syllable structures).

Thousands of new words have been created covering technical areas such as the sciences, computing, technology administration, commerce, sports, and government. There are still gaps in many areas.

Traditionally no. There are Māori words and phrases that most would regard as profanities. I am unaware of  any single term that could be regarded as a blasphemy. There are a few obscenities in modern Māori that have been borrowed from English.

There are four.

Benton, Tumoana, and Robb (1982) produced a word list based on a small corpus of some 200,000 words of speaking and writing. Although somewhat dated and now out of print, it is still offers useful insights.

Harlow (1990) produced a word index and frequency of list of Nga mahi a nga Tupuna, a book containing many traditional Māori stories collected in the 1800s.

Harlow and Thorton (1986) produced a word index and frequency of list of Nga Moteatea, three volumes of traditional Māori song poetry.

Mary Boyce’s PhD (2006) involved the compilation of a Māori language broadcast corpus.

Aroha (i.e., in the sense of “I love you”).