Language purism in language contact: A case study of New Zealand English and New Zealand Maori

Add to your list(s) Download to your calendar using vCal

• Miriam Meyerhoff (Oxford)
• Friday 14 February 2025, 15:00-16:00
• Online (link provided closer to the date if you register here: https://forms.office.com/e/S5fUnGBgjj).

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Hannah Davidson.

New Zealand English (NZE) and New Zealand Maori (NZM) have been in regular contact since the 19th century. Despite widely-celebrated revitalisation efforts such as the ‘language nests’, NZM remains much less widely-spoken than NZE . Some NZM vocabulary has been incorporated into everyday NZE and in recent years there has been an increase in the use of NZM lexicon in a variety of domains. How to pronounce these NZM borrowings when they are used in NZE has become a bit of a cultural litmus test. One of my interests is in how the nature of the linguistic systems in contact constrain and influence what features become iconicised and the subject of verbal hygiene practices. 

This talk is part of the Cambridge Sociolinguistics Circle series.

This talk is included in these lists:

• Cambridge Sociolinguistics Circle
• Online (link provided closer to the date if you register here: https://forms.office.com/e/S5fUnGBgjj)

Note that ex-directory lists are not shown.