Language contact phenomena on social media: Perspectives from te Reo Māori and New Zealand English

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Among the last places to be reached by the express-train sequence of Austronesian expansion, the shores of Aotearoa New Zealand are a bustling place of linguistic resurgence. Māori, the Indigenous language of the iwi (“tribes”) whose waka (“canoes”) reached these lands over 800 years ago, has suffered near-extinction at the hands of a dominant lingua franca (English). However, Māori is experiencing a wave of revitalisation, with social media being a vehicle for such efforts. Despite having been an official language of Aotearoa since 1987, the number of proficient speakers of Māori remains low. In this chapter, we review research analysing Twitter discourse to show how online posts increase the prestige and vitality of Māori. This body of work suggests that users harness social media affordances through lexical borrowing, code-switching, and language play to signal a sense of belonging and shared identity. To illustrate this, we draw on a case-study of “hybrid hashtags” in which elements from Māori and English are mixed. Many of the phenomena identified here fit under the wider practice of “minimal bilingualism” recognised in popular culture elsewhere.