Item

Words on walls: The linguistic landscape of Kirikiriroa primary school classrooms

Abstract
Language contact between te reo Māori and English has resulted in one of the central features of New Zealand English (NZE): the integration of loanwords from the Indigenous, donor language, te reo Māori, into a dominant Lingua Franca (Hay et al., 2008). Previous works have analysed the presence and presentation of these loanwords across a number of mediums. Our study, however, examines data directed at a previously unexamined demographic: primary school-aged children. We aim to establish which loanwords children are regularly exposed to, and thus examine a most relevant domain: the classroom. Considering the linguistic landscape of classrooms (schoolscapes) offers insight into the language use that occurs within them. Further, the classroom is educational in the traditional sense, but also in the developmental sense, in the acquisition of broader social meaning. Previous schoolscapes research has highlighted not only their pedagogical importance, but their influence in the construction and transmission of language ideologies (Pzymus and Huddleston 2021; Brown 2012), making these particularly valuable spaces to study. This study presents a schoolscape investigation of nine Waikato classrooms by analysing loanwords arising in educational artefacts directed at primary-aged children (7-11) in an English-medium school setting. We make the following contributions: (1) a systematic schoolscape method for analysing contact-induced language phenomena; (2) quantitative and qualitative analyses of loanwords identified in our data; (3) a detailed taxonomic expansion of te reo Māori loanword categories (semantic and syntactic) in present day NZE. In this talk, we ask the following questions: RQ1) What type of te reo Māori (loan)words are children regularly exposed to through schoolscapes in A/NZ? RQ2) What is their distribution across schools/classrooms/years? We find that, in the classes examined, children encounter both high levels of exposure to te reo Māori (loan)words and high levels of variation in the types of words present. On average, children encounter one te reo Māori token for every ten English tokens. As in previously identified trends (Macalister, 2006b), most loanwords found are nouns belonging to semantic categories pertaining to the environment, place names and social culture items. However, we also identify prominently occurring words and word types that have not previously been identified in corpora. We show that, within classrooms, children regularly encounter a landscape richer in te reo Māori (loan)words than previously seen, but also one characterised by substantial variation.
Type
Conference Contribution
Type of thesis
Series
Citation
Burnette, J., Calude, A., & Whaanga, H. (2024, December 9-10). Words on walls: The linguistic landscape of Kirikiriroa primary school classrooms [Conference item]. New Zealand Linguistics Society Conference, Christchurch.
Date
2024
Publisher
Degree
Supervisors
Rights
This is a PowerPoint file from an oral presentation at the New Zealand Linguistics Society Conference 2024. © The authors.