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Māori, the threatened language of the indigenous people of New Zealand, has been undergoing revitalisation since the 1970s. The MAONZE project (Māori and New Zealand English) has studied sound change in Māori by comparing the speech of historical elders, present-day elders and young speakers. Here we analyse the read speech from nine present-day elders and twelve young speakers and compare it with the results from our previous analysis of their conversational material to investigate whether style shift occurs in more careful Māori speech. Pronunciation change was restricted to the backing of long /u:/, a sound whose fronting had been stigmatised and of which older female speakers seemed to be particularly aware. We conclude that, although there is some indication of style-shift in the read material, ‘first wave’ (Eckert 2012) sociolinguistic methodology is not appropriate for Māori speakers whose notion of class and prestige differ from that of previously articulated sociolinguistic norms.

Style, in the study of variation and change, is intimately linked with broader questions about linguistic innovation and change, standards, social norms, and individual speakers’ stances. This article examines style when applied to lesser-studied languages. Style is both (i) the product of speakers’ choices among variants, and (ii) something reflexively produced through the association of variants and the social position of the users of those variants. In the context of the languages considered here, we ask “What questions do we have about variation in this language and what notion(s) of style will answer them?” We highlight methodological, conceptual and analytical challenges for the notion of style as it is usually operationalised in variationist sociolinguistics. We demonstrate that style is a useful research heuristic which – when marshalled alongside locally-oriented accounts of, or proxies for “standard” and “prestige”, in apparent time – allows us to describe language and explore change. It is also a means for exploring social meaning, which speakers may have more or less conscious control over.

Aim To determine whether teachers' reports of student academic performance can suffice for research purposes by comparing it with a curriculum-based standardised test. Methods In this longitudinal cohort study of children born at risk of neonatal hypoglycaemia, teachers' global assessment of student performance was compared with assessment tools for teaching and learning (asTTle) at 9-10 years. Performance on asTTLe was rated as being below, at or above that expected on the national curriculum for year and term of schooling. Teachers similarly rated the child's performance against the national curriculum. Results Of 125 children assessed, 104 had paired data for analysis. On asTTLe, 28% were rated below, 55% at and 17% above the expected curriculum level in reading and 24, 54 and 22%, respectively, in mathematics. Equivalent teacher ratings were 23, 58 and 19% in reading and 36, 55 and 9% in mathematics, respectively. However, there was limited agreement between asTTle and teacher rating of achievement in reading (κ = 0.23 (95% confidence interval 0.07-0.40)) and no significant agreement in mathematics (κ = 0.07 (95% confidence interval -0.09-0.22)). Only 45% of children performing below the curriculum level in reading and 52% in mathematics were correctly identified by teachers. Conclusion In cohort studies, teacher ratings cannot substitute standardised educational testing.

Te reo Māori (referred to as Māori), New Zealand's indigenous language, is under-resourced in language technology. Māori speakers are bilingual, where Māori is code-switched with English. Unfortunately, there are minimal resources available for Māori language technology, language detection and code-switch detection between Māori-English pair. Both English and Māori use Roman-derived orthography making rule-based systems for detecting language and code-switching restrictive. Most Māori language detection is done manually by language experts. This research builds a Māori-English bilingual database of 66,016,807 words with word-level language annotation. The New Zealand Parliament Hansard debates reports were used to build the database. The language labels are assigned using language-specific rules and expert manual annotations. Words with the same spelling, but different meanings, exist for Māori and English. These words could not be categorised as Māori or English based on word-level language rules. Hence, manual annotations were necessary. An analysis reporting the various aspects of the database such as metadata, year-wise analysis, frequently occurring words, sentence length and N-grams is also reported. The database developed here is a valuable tool for future language and speech technology development for Aotearoa New Zealand. The methodology followed to label the database can also be followed by other low-resourced language pairs., Submitted to Springer Language Resources and Evaluation Journal 2022

AIM To determine whether a multi-domain school readiness screening, the Before School Check (B4SC), identifies children at risk of low educational achievement and to compare the educational outcomes between those referred for intervention and those with B4SC concerns who were not referred. METHODS In this longitudinal cohort study of children born at risk of neonatal hypoglycaemia (N 331), the B4SC was performed at 4.5 years of age and a standardised curriculum-based measure of educational achievement was completed at 9-10 years of age. Outcomes of school readiness screening were categorised into 'school readiness concern' or 'no school readiness concern' while 'below standard' and 'well below standard' ratings of educational achievement were combined into a single category of 'low educational achievement'. RESULTS Overall, 52% of children had ≥1 school readiness concerns at the B4SC, predominantly about behaviour (46%). Having ≥1 school readiness concern was associated with a nearly twofold increase in the likelihood of low academic achievement (OR 1.85, 95% CI 1.14, 3.02), which was apparent only for behaviour concerns. Of the 128 children with behaviour concerns, only 10 (8%) were referred for further interventions. There was a statistically non-significant increase in the rates of low academic achievement among those referred than those non-referred (60% vs. 47%). CONCLUSION Identification of behaviour concerns during B4SC is associated with a moderate increase in the likelihood of low academic achievement at 9-10 years. Further, research is needed to determine how academic achievement can be improved in children with behaviour concerns at school entry.

Although there have been many studies of New Zealand English (NZE) vowels, little has been written about the nurse vowel /ɜ:/. This study uses data from three groups of Māori speakers of NZE born b...

This article investigates sound change in the vowels of Māori, the indigenous language of New Zealand. It examines the relationship between sound changes in Māori and in New Zealand English, the more dominant language, with which Māori has been in close contact for nearly 200 years. We report on the analysis of three adult speaker groups whose birth dates span 100 years. All speakers were bilingual in Māori and New Zealand English. In total the speech of 31 men and 31 women was investigated. Analysis was done on the first and second formant values, extracted from the vowel targets. There has been considerable movement in the Māori vowel space. We find that the sound change in the Māori monophthongs can be directly attributed to the impact of New Zealand English, however the situation for the diphthongs is not so clear cut. There is some evidence that both New Zealand English monophthongs and diphthongs are impacting on the Māori diphthongs, but so too are the Māori monophthongs. We conclude that although New Zealand English has had a strong influence on Māori, there is very strong evidence that new generations of speakers of Māori are acquiring a phonemic system with its own internal parameters and consistencies.

This study assessed the status of te reo Māori, the indigenous language of New Zealand, in the context of New Zealand English. From a broadly representative sample of 6327 two-year-olds (Growing Up in New Zealand), 6090 mothers (96%) reported their children understood English, and 763 mothers (12%) reported their children understood Māori. Parents completed the new MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory short forms for te reo Māori (NZM: CDI sf) and New Zealand English (NZE: CDI sf). Mothers with higher education levels had children with larger vocabularies in both te reo Māori and NZ English. For English speakers, vocabulary advantages also existed for girls, first-borns, monolinguals, those living in areas of lower deprivation, and those whose mothers had no concerns about their speech and language. Because more than 99% of Māori speakers were bilingual, te reo Māori acquisition appears to be occurring in the context of the acquisition of New Zealand English.

From ancient Spain to Italy to Dura Europus, Inscriptions in the Private Sphere in the Greco-Roman World provides a series of case studies illustrating the variety and importance of writing in private spaces in antiquity.

In addition to the widely reported adultery committed by Julia prior to her banishment, Pliny records that Julia was seen to place a corona on the statue of Marsyas. While the accusations of adultery have been considered in regard to Augustus’ so‐called morality laws, or as the smokescreen for a conspiracy, the Marsyas incident has been neglected. However, the symbolism of the various traditions regarding Marsyas indicate that Julia was sending her father a powerful public message which was a factor in his decision to remove her from the city.

The Māori tense/aspect marker ka has historically two allomorphs: one, /ka:/, which is used when the rest of the verb phrase consists of only two morae, and the other, /ka/, for longer phrases. Recordings of native speakers born toward the end of the nineteenth century show that this distribution was at that time observed with a high degree of consistency. However, more recent speaker groups show variable behavior in this respect, with modern younger speakers tending to show abandonment of the allomorphy in favor of consistent use of the short form. This shift is attributable both to a proportional increase in the use of longer phrases over the same period and to the decreasing use of Māori generally, so that opportunities to acquire the inherited rule have diminished considerably.

This article examines the relationship between the frontness of /u/ and the aspiration of /t/ in both Māori and New Zealand English (NZE). In both languages, these processes can be observed since the earliest recordings dating from the latter part of the nineteenth century. We report analyses of these developments for three groups of male speakers of Māori spanning the twentieth century. We compare the Māori analyses with analyses of related features of the speakers' English and of the English of monolingual contemporaries. The occurrence of these processes in Māori cannot be seen simply as interference from NZE as the Māori-speaking population became increasingly bilingual. We conclude that it was the arrival of English with its contrast between aspirated and unaspirated plosives, rather than direct borrowing, that was the trigger for the fronting of the hitherto stable back Māori /u/ vowel together with increased aspiration of /t/ before both /i/ and /u/.

Māori and English have been in increasing contact within New Zealand for over 200 years. The impact of each language on the other in vocabulary, which has been borrowed in both directions, is clear. More subtle is the mutual influence in the area of pronunciation. The MAONZE project has been investigating changes in the pronunciation of Māori and of the English of speakers of Māori, using recordings of seven kaumātua born in the 19th century who were interviewed by the Mobile Unit of Radio New Zealand in the 1940s (referred to in the text as the TK group), of ten kaumātua alive today (K), and of ten younger speakers (T). This paper describes our methodology and reports the results of the investigation of the long and short vowels of Māori as well as of some diphthongs. These were all studied acoustically, that is to say, using computers to analyse the sound waves characteristic of each sound. For each vowel and diphthong, and for each speaker, we attempted to analyse thirty examples, though some sounds are relatively rare, such as /ī/ and /ao/, so that this target could not always be achieved. The analysis did indeed find that there had been shifts in the pronunciation of these sounds over the three generations of speakers in the study. Except for the distinction between /a/ and /ā/, the length and qualitative difference between the historical long and short vowels is decreasing. Most striking is the shift in /u/ and /ū/ to a much more forward position in the mouth, a change which parallels movement in English. The five diphthongs studied were /au, ou, ao, ai, ae/, all of which are clearly distinct in the speech of the TK and K groups, but which are tending to merge to three in the younger group, who no longer distinguish tae and tai or hau and hou so clearly. Within the T group, we distinguished between those who had been speaking Māori since birth (R1), and those who had acquired good Māori at school or later (R2). It turned out that in all the changes taking place, the R2-T group is leading the way, and is thus probably the direction the language will take into the future, particularly as the majority of younger speakers of Māori these days belong to this category.

What becomes of knowledge when a language has been displaced through colonisation and is being recovered and revitalized? In the 1970s in Aotearoa (the Maori name for New Zealand), Maori began teaching their children through the medium of te reo Maori [Maori language] (L1) in an attempt to save it from extinction. This paper explores the translation work in relation to a new technical language development (L3) based on the language of instruction (L2) for a new Maori language science curriculum [putaiao]. We argue that the development of new terminology, no matter how culturally sensitive the process is, creates new problems. First, the new words can be perceived as representing traditional knowledge and, secondly, traditional Maori knowledge will be erased with the new language. The challenge presented to all concerned is how students will develop a more authentic experience of Maori language, knowledge and culture. The paper argues that the journey between science and putaiao is an ongoing transformation based on language and the epistemology held within and is made more complex by the relationships that exist between L1 (home), L2 (school), and L3 (discipline specific) in a language revitalization context.

In order to establish the socio-linguistic and cultural resonances of the signifier, the author intends first to survey literary attestations of retrograde C in the canonical tradition. Then, in the context of a broader overview of epigraphic traces of "Ɔ"., the author examines three inscriptions, one from the city of Rome (CIL 6.37156), the other two set up outside Ostia (CIL 14.299, 1808), with a view to illustrating the implications arising from the designations of female patronage which exist in the ancient epigraphic landscape. It should be noted that any expansion in the conceptualization of republican and imperial patronage networks incorporates the recognized types of exchange relationship in Roman society, namely, that of benefactor and recipient, who were of sufficiently similar status to make competition for social prestige conceivable; and that of unequal partners, in no way implying that an inferior's beneficium to her/his social superior proved the former's ascendancy. Keywords: CIL 6.37156; female patronage; inscriptions; retrograde C; Roman Gaia

The assessment of children's indigenous language has, in general, received very little attention despite the fact that it is a worldwide issue with children in every continent growing up in multilingual situations. In this chapter we focus on approaches to assessing children's indigenous language knowledge in two very different contexts—Australia and New Zealand. Indigenous languages in Australia are in rapid decline. At the time of European settlement there were in the region of 250 languages, many of which were spoken by only a small number of people. However, there are now few indigenous communities where children are growing up learning their traditional indigenous language, and it is predicted that at the current rate of loss there will be no indigenous languages by 2050. The situation in New Zealand is quite different, with Māori being the single indigenous language. However, it is spoken by less than 25% of the Māori population (approximately 15% of New Zealand's population of 4 million are Māori) and is also in decline. In these different contexts, therefore, approaches to assessment are necessarily different. In Australia the limited amount of research that has been undertaken has focused on receptive skills, arguing that these measures can provide a useful picture of children's current language knowledge. In New Zealand, all Māori children are exposed to both English and Māori while growing up, but given the prevalence of English in New Zealand society it is difficult to determine how many Māori children truly are first language speakers of Māori or Māori dominant. Almost all Māori-speaking children attend kōhanga reo (early childhood education centers based on Māori culture and using Māori as the medium of communication) and some form of Māori bilingual/immersion education in the compulsory school sector. Assessment tools developed for the Māori-medium sector have focused on numeracy and literacy, although recent research has attempted to develop measures to assess students' proficiency of spoken Māori. Keywords: Assessment methods; Indigenous languages; Language policy

Previous research identifies as crucial to successful online learning and teaching (eLT) transformative pedagogical strategies. Transformative L & T is the process by which we call into question our taken-for-granted habits of mind or mindsets to make them more inclusive, discriminating, open and reflective in order to guide our actions. This process can be codified into three phases that effectively ‘close the L & T loop’: critical reflection (feedback), reflective discourse (evaluation), and action (learning and teaching quality). This paper will examine the validity of these elements of transformative learning in relation to a blended (on-campus/online) tertiary-level capstone unit and current pedagogical models of eLT. Identifying and analyzing transformative L & T principles embedded (explicitly and implicitly) in the current blended experience provides a range of learning ideas, beliefs, habits and assumptions – pointing to self-direction, metacognition, and collaborative learning as key eLT facilitators – from which a broader pedagogical template responsive to eLT needs can be developed.

This paper discusses the episode in the laudatio 'Turiae' of an elite Roman woman's interaction with the triumuir M. Aemilius Lepidus (LT 2.13-17). Scholarship of the last century has discussed this element of the LT from a variety of standpoints. None of these treatments has approached the description of the experiences and actions of the laudata from the perspective of the ancient consumer of information and meaning within the complete epigraphic environment of the inscription. I will look at the ways in which a contemporary audience perceived and understood the details of this episode in the life-history of the laudata in relation to the wider sensorium of visual, auditory, and kinaesthetic cues comprising the funerary monumentum.