Te Tai – Treaty Settlement Stories

From 1769, Māori began to interact with new visitors to their lands. At first, it was European men under the guise of exploration, then whalers and sealers from Europe and North America, and later missionaries. They brought with them different languages, technologies and ideas, all of which Māori adopted when it suited them to do so.

During the early period of contact between Māori and Europeans, Māori was the predominant language of New Zealand. It was used extensively in social, religious, commercial and political interactions among Māori, and between Māori and Pākehā.

It is easy to recognise the use of new technology when it is attached to physical objects. As Māori incorporated new foodstuffs, tools and weapons into their lives, they adapted previous Māori words. The various words for musket often started with ‘pū’, a prefix for wind instruments: pūkaea, pūtātara, pūtōrino. In other cases, foreign words were transliterated – mīere (‘miel’ is the French word for honey), parāoa (flour/bread) and pepa (paper).

What is certain is that Māori took to literacy with speed and enthusiasm. Reading and writing were intrinsically linked to religion, as missionaries taught Māori to read and write and Māori in turn taught missionaries more about te reo Māori.

As te reo Māori had never been written down before, an orthography (conventions for how a language is written) needed to be created. The first attempt at this was a collaboration between two Ngāpuhi rangatira, Hongi Hika and Waikato, and Thomas Kendall, a missionary stationed at Rangihoua. In 1820, they travelled to Cambridge, England to work with Professor Samuel Lee. The result was the Grammar and vocabulary of the language of New Zealand.

Back in Aotearoa, Māori were learning to read and write at an astonishing rate. Literacy became another new skill that could increase mana – northern rangatira boasted that their children could read and write. Missionary translators and printers struggled to keep up with the demand for printed texts, most of which were religious in nature.

The different groups of European arrivals picked up te reo Māori in various ways. The missionaries actively learnt the language; their children absorbed it as they grew up surrounded by Māori. Some whalers and sealers married Māori women or worked with Māori communities, and by necessity acquired a working knowledge of te reo Māori.

In the first half of the 19th century, te reo Māori was still the primary medium of conversation, although some Māori became bilingual before the 1840s.