Abstract

When foreign words are borrowed into te reo Māori and are made to conform to its phonemic inventory and phonotactics, speakers must often make choices as to how to deal with the loanwords’ consonant clusters. Ray Harlow’s foundational chapter ‘Borrowing and its alternatives in Māori’ (Harlow, 2004) sets out the basic choice between anaptyxis and consonant loss, but which strategies are used for which te reo Māori loanwords; why; which vowels are inserted when anaptyxis is involved; and which consonants are lost in which environments when cluster reduction occurs has been little studied. This paper summarises the conclusions in the literature and extends them by a study of the loanword appendix in Herbert William Williams’s classic A Dictionary of the Maori Language (Williams, 1844/1971) to propose a fuller set of conclusions regarding the phonological adaptation of loanwords in te reo Māori.

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