Assessing the size of non-Maori-speakers' active Maori lexicon.

ABSTRACT: Most non-Māori-speaking New Zealanders are regularly exposed to Māori throughout their lives without seeming to build any extensive Māori lexicon; at best, they know a small number of words which are frequently used and sometimes borrowed into English. Here, we ask how many Māori words non-Māori-speaking New Zealanders know, in two ways: how many can they identify as real Māori words, and how many can they actively define? We show that non-Māori-speaking New Zealanders can readily identify many more Māori words than they can define, and that the number of words they can reliably define is quite small. This result adds crucial support to the idea presented in earlier work that non-Māori-speaking New Zealanders have implicit form-based (proto-lexical) knowledge of many Māori words, but expli

SUBMITTER: Oh YM 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10446205 | biostudies-literature | 2023

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature