A Grammatical Comparison of the Spoken English of Maori and Pakeha Women in Levin

Abstract

The notion of the existence of a distinctive, stable dialect of Maori English has long been a source of debate in New Zealand. It is often assumed that Maori and Pakeha differ in the variety of English they speak, yet research in this area has yet to provide solid evidence to substantiate such a claim. For this reason it was decided to conduct a grammatical comparison of the casual speech of two groups of people who had all the same social characteristics except ethnic background. The sample used comprised five Maori and five Pakeha lower class women aged between 25 and 37, who had resided in Levin for most of their lives. The survey took the form of a tape-recorded sociolinguistic interview, in which informants were asked questions on topics that were designed to promote the elicitation of a large quantity of casual speech. A demographic questionnaire was also conducted to ensure that all informants were socially equivalent in all respects except ethnicity. A number of grammatical features were identified that occurred with significantly higher frequency in the speech of the Maori informants. The use of the past participle for the past tense, the over-extension of the -s present tense ending, and the deletion of auxiliary with have got, were features of this type. A number of other features occurred exclusively in the Maori corpus. The deletion of auxiliary have in a number of environments other than with have got, the omission of with be going to, and the use of double negatives, were of this nature. Moreover, the fact that these features manifested a consistently higher frequency of occurrence in the speech of the Maori group constitutes a cumulative indication that the variety of English used by Maori and Pakeha speakers is not the same. It was also found, however, that the Maori group was still producing a greater percentage of standard variants of most of the variables cited above, and that not all informants of the Maori group contributed to the group score for each of the variables in question. In spite of this, the fact that all social variables except ethnicity were strictly controlled makes it difficult not to conclude that being Maori is a major factor in the variation identified in the speech of the Maori informants in this study.