Pronunciation Guide

Vowels

Moriori has five vowel sounds, similar to the vowels found in Māori and many other Polynesian languages:

• a — "a" in "car"
• e — "e" in "get"
• i — "ee" in "see"
• o — "o" in "for"
• u — "oo" in "moon"

One vowel worth special note is u. In contemporary usage it is generally pronounced as in Māori, similar to "oo" in "moon". Historically, however, early observers recorded a more front-of-mouth quality, closer to the French u, which has largely given way in modern use.

What makes Moriori vowels a little more involved is that each one can appear in three ways, depending on how long or short it is held:

• Short (ă) — marked with a breve, a small curved line above the vowel. A breve tells you the vowel is very short, sometimes barely heard at all.
• Standard (a) — an ordinary, unmarked vowel, held for a normal length.
• Long (ā) — marked with a macron, a straight line above the vowel. A macron tells you to hold the vowel for roughly twice as long as a standard one.

Length matters in Moriori the same way it does in Māori: two words can be spelled almost identically but mean different things depending on whether a vowel is short or long. Breves are less common than macrons, and are mostly found on vowels at the end of a word, where they signal a vowel that is fading out rather than fully sounded.

Consonants

Moriori uses twelve single-letter consonants:

D, G, H, K, M, N, P, R, T, V, W, Y

A few points worth noting:

• These letters are generally pronounced much as they would be in English, with softer, less forceful articulation than English speakers may be used to.
• R is a light, single-tap roll of the tongue, similar to the R sound in Māori. It is a brief roll, not the longer, sustained trill found in Spanish.
• G is not pronounced like the English "g". It is closer to the Samoan "g", a soft nasal sound similar to "ng" in "singer".

Digraphs

A digraph is two letters written together that represent one sound, not two sounds run together. Moriori has seven of them:

CH, HH, KH, NG, TC, TCH, WH

• NG — a single nasal sound, the same as the "ng" in "singer" (not the "ng" in "finger"). This is the same sound written "ng" in Māori.
• WH — pronounced like an English "f", following the same convention used in Māori orthography.
• CH — pronounced the same as the "ch" in the English word "church".
• TC — similar to CH, but with a subtle "s" quality mixed in, producing a faint hiss.
• TCH — similar to CH, but with a subtle "t" sound at the front.
• HH, KH — these represent a stressed or emphasised version of the plain "h" and "k" sounds. Early transcribers described the tongue arching toward the roof of the mouth and a slight extra puff of breath, which sometimes produces a faint "i" or "e" sound just before the main vowel. You may encounter this written in several different ways across older sources, since it was notoriously difficult for early writers to capture on the page.

Glottal Stops

Moriori also has a glottal stop, a brief, sharp catch in the voice, similar to the sound in the middle of the English expression "uh-oh". It is shown in writing with either an apostrophe ( ' ) or a hyphen ( - ). This is an important sound in its own right, not just a spelling mark, and can distinguish one word from another.

Word-Final Consonants

One of the more unusual features of Moriori, compared to other Polynesian languages, is that many words end in a consonant rather than a vowel. This happens because Moriori words are frequently clipped: a final vowel that would be fully pronounced in a closely related language is reduced or dropped entirely in everyday speech, leaving the preceding consonant standing at the end of the word.

Most Polynesian languages are strictly open-syllable, meaning every syllable ends in a vowel and no word ends in a consonant. Moriori's tendency toward final-consonant clipping is therefore a distinctive feature of the language, and one that early observers commented on repeatedly.

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