ABSTRACT
Maori belongs to the East Polynesian branch of the Nuclear-Polynesian subgroup of the large Austronesian family, of which it is the most southerly member. When Cook discovered New Zealand in the eighteenth century the Maori population numbered about 300,000, and had been in the islands for over 500 years. The first Maori grammar, by Kendall, appeared in 1815, and in the 1820s a phonetic script for Maori was devised in Cambridge.
