Story: English language in New Zealand

Victoria University of Wellington became an important centre of New Zealand English scholarship under Professor Ian Gordon, who taught there from 1937 to 1974. He also wrote columns in the Listener magazine and had his own radio show on the topic, which has long been of interest to ordinary New Zealanders as well as scholars. Gordon was interested in the distinctiveness of New Zealand English and dismissive of those he described as 'moralising' grammarians who could not accept change in the language. Listen to him explain how he decided which Māori words to include in the New Zealand edition of the Collins dictionary. 

Transcript

Well I'll tell you my criteria and I took all Māori words which had been in my opinion naturalised into the normal speech or the normal written language of New Zealanders. My criterion was any word which any Māori word which I would find in an ordinary newspaper, not in inverted commas, not in italics. In other words, just accepted into the run of the English sentence. I took that as a word which was adopted. I put in a few and I have it in my introduction. I put in a few which when I was writing some years ago were not so very popular. Like Māoritanga. I mean Māoritanga know it's an in word, but when I was doing my work some years ago it was just coming in. And a word like 'marae' for example, has got connotations for the Māori which I don't think it possibly has for the European New Zealander.