Maori English: A socio-cognitive & cultural linguistic take

This project is located in the wide research field of World Englishes (WEs), which linguistically explores the different Englishes used around the globe. The project focuses on a specific English variety, Maori English (ME), which is spoken in New Zealand (NZ) and has traditionally been associated with the indigenous Maori minority group. ME is classified as a contact variety that historically evolved due to the contact between Maori and English and continues to be influenced by Maori linguistic and cultural inputs. The project aims at investigating potential differences in language use among different groups of young New Zealanders who differ in their ethnicities (Maori and Pakeha, aka NZ Europeans) and language knowledge (monolinguals and bilinguals). One of the main research hypotheses is that the linguistic and cultural background of Maori bilinguals will show up in their use of English. Based on this hypothesis, the project intends to identify Maori culturally specific contents in English. These could appear, for example, in the selection of topics and themes, in the use of codeswitching and lexical borrowings, in the type of figurative language employed, and in the expression of certain cultural conceptualizations. The analysis will be based on linguistic data gathered from a story-telling task that was administered to 140 participants in NZ. Participants have been assigned to 4 groups of speakers who differ in terms of their linguistic repertoires (monolingual and bilingual) and ethnic affiliations (Maori and Pakeha). These data represent an entirely new and unique set of spoken data, which is expected to spur further research in the future. Accordingly, one aim of the project is to gather these data in the New Zealand Stories Corpus, a specialized corpus of narrations, and to make it freely available to the community of linguists and interested researchers upon completion of the project. The project is not only innovative because of its data but also for its approach. Inspired by the most recent developments in WEs research, the project intends to fruitfully combine theoretical and methodological insights from the fields of cognitive sociolinguistics and cultural linguistics, two research frameworks that have only recently begun to be applied to the study of WEs. The project will involve a team of researchers based at the Department of English at the University of Klagenfurt (Austria), led by Dr. Marta Degani, and support will also be provided by a range of international cooperation partners at NZ universities and at EURAC research (Bolzano).