The sound recordings

Because of the very nature of Maori English, getting good recordings of this variety in formal settings, in a Pakeha institution (a university) and with Pakeha researchers is difficult. None of the recordings provided here is completely prototypical, even when we have Maori people speaking to each other without Pakeha people present. Nevertheless, some of the typical features of Maori English can be heard in these recordings.

The sound files provided include a short conversation about a recent graphic series of drink-driving ads on New Zealand television, the ‘South Wind’ passage, and the extended word list. The passage and word list are read by one of the two speakers in the conversation (speaker C, who is on the left channel of the stereo file). The speaker is a young female from the Wellington region, and who identifies as Maori. In addition, the words from the word list have also been made available in separate speech files, in which each word is paired with the version produced by speaker F, the young female speaker of Pakeha New Zealand English.

Many of the features that might be commented on in the Maori English samples can be characterized as features of a broad New Zealand English pronunciation. As noted above, it is a high level of co-occurrence of such features that may contribute to the character of Maori English. Nevertheless, some of the characteristics of the read speech in these Maori English samples are ambiguous in their interpretation, since they could reflect a careful speech style rather than being features of Maori English. For instance, the more peripheral vowels found in weak syllables might reflect the tendency in Maori English towards syllable-based rhythm (and a consequential lessening of the contrast between full and reduced vowels), but they might also be a result of a more deliberate reading style. Similarly, the two-vowel like nature of some of the diphthongs might result from careful reading. However, some of these features can also be identified in the conversation recording, and so may be more broadly characteristic of this Maori English speaker.

The second conversation is an interview between a male Maori interviewer and a female Maori interviewee, originally broadcast by Radio New Zealand. The male interviewer sounds rather more obviously Maori than the female speakers in the first conversation. For the interviewee, code-switching on Maori words is very obvious, although the Maori words do not always get the value that they would have in monolingual Maori.

Finally, there is a comment by a mature, male Maori speaker. This is a read passage, written by the speaker, The Right Reverend Muru Walters, MA, Dip Ed, LTh (Aot), Adv Dip Tchg, PGD (Arts) who is the Maori Anglican Bishop of Aotearoa (New Zealand) for the district ki te Upoko o te Ika (the Wellington region). The passage was first broadcast on Radio New Zealand. This speaker illustrates the use of English by someone who is a fluent Maori speaker, older than the other speakers illustrated here, and also highly educated. The voice quality is typical of a speaker of his generation, and the code-switching into Maori is obvious. Because the passage is read for broadcast, it is very clearly enunciated, and in that respect is not typical of conversational Maori English.