Abstract
The purpose of this study was to examine Maori borrowings in New Zealand English through the lens of language ecology. It is argued that Maori loans in English are not simply historical substratum traces of contacts between indigenous and transported cultures, but significant markers of bicultural society in contemporary New Zealand. The findings demonstrated a substantial amount of the Maori loans in New Zealand English, a high degree of their assimilation and involvement into word-formation processes, ability to combine with various derivational morphemes to produce etymologically hybrid structures, active semantic adaptation and functional relevance for institutional and non-institutional communication settings. The abovementioned facts provide evidence to suggest that the substratum elements appeared to be highly competitive in the multicultural setting created by the invasion of the English-speaking culture in New Zealand. Among the positive effects of such competition was that indigenous cultural markers were able to occupy a broad niche in the genetically diverse New Zealand community, thereby realizing communicative complementarity between two cultures in contact.
Highlights
The issues of multiculturalism, language diversity and contact have always been topical matters to linguistics and contributing disciplines
The ecological perspective to language, from which it is interpreted as an essential constituent of sociality (Garner, 2004: 62-69), is necessitated by the increasing globalization, development of a lingua franca, and destruction of the old linguistic and cultural order in the world
New Zealand English is distinguished by loans from Maori, the indigenous language of the region, providing additional evidence of “mixed heritage and acculturation within mainstream New Zealand society” (Fozdar, Perkins, 2014: 134)
Summary
The issues of multiculturalism, language diversity and contact have always been topical matters to linguistics and contributing disciplines. Despite a growing number of multidisciplinary publications on language policy in New Zealand with particular attention to the maintenance of the Maori language as a valuable source of indigenous culture and a condition of Maori identity revitalization (Grenoble, Whaley, 2005 : 51-54; Herriman, Burnaby, 1996: 62-99), significant findings about history, structural and semantic features (Hay, 2008: 67-73; Holmes, 1997: 65-101) or functioning (Onysko, Calude, 2013; Trye et al, 2020) of Maori loans in New Zealand English, their communicative value remains unresolved. The selected borrowings (900 in total) were interpreted by the structural, semantic, contextual and cognitive methods to discover features signaling cultural and cognitive impact of Maori component
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