ABSTRACT
One of the many signs of the decay of the Maori language is a general depletion in the vocabulary known to those speakers who remain. Even those older speakers who have lived most of their lives in predominantly Maori-speaking communities frequently find themselves using English words, often not even phonologically adapted. Sometimes this is for items not part of traditional Maori life, but such Anglicisms in many cases replace the traditional Maori terms, with the subsequent loss of those traditional terms. This has made it difficult to deal with the questions in this section. Williams’s Dictionary records many terms not known to my consultant Thus I culled about 200 terms relating to kinship from Williams, and of these, almost half were unknown to my consultant Some of this is no doubt due to the recording of forms restricted in dialect, but much of it is due to language impoverishment under pressure from English. In the sections below, I have in large measure restricted myself to items that are clearly still in use, as only in these cases is there adequate information available.
