Use and acceptance of Maori borrowings in New Zealand English

Examination Thesis from the year 2006 in the subject Speech Science / Linguistics grade: 20 Ernst Moritz Arndt University of Greifswald (Institut für Anglistik/Amerikanistik) language: English abstract: New Zealand English is the variety of English that is spoken by the roughly 4 million inhabitants of New Zealand - a South Pacific state which consists of two main islands simply called the North and the South Island. New Zealand is a bicultural country with both English and Māori being its official languages. Since the British colonisation of the young state in 1840 these two languages have been coexisting side by side and in consequence have influenced each other. One result of this long-standing and intensive language contact is the incorporation of Māori loans into New Zealand English (NZE) which distinguishes it most distinctly from other national standards as no other variety of English shares this feature with NZE. Thus the use and acceptance of Māori borrowings in NZE will be the main subject of this paper. In the first part of this paper the position of NZE among other national varieties of English will be discussed. This will be followed by a closer examination of the languages that have participated in the process of borrowing in NZ. Since borrowing is a phenomenon resulting from language contact the third chapter will give an overview about the extra- and intralinguistic factors that form the frame for the process of borrowing. On the background of those conditions the use and acceptance of Māori borrowings in NZE will then be comprehensively discussed. There are remarkable differences in the process of lexical transfer as well as in the use of the Māori loanwords at different stages in New Zealand's history. Therefore the history of English borrowing from Māori will be examined according to these stages in the fourth part. Following this the present use of these loans will be investigated by the data deriving from a pilot study which wa