The motivation and development of MPAi, a Māori Pronunciation Aid

Abstract

This paper outlines the motivation and development of a pronunciation aid (MPAi) for the Māori language, the language of the indigenous people of New Zealand. Māori is threatened and after a break in transmission the language is currently undergoing revitalization. The data for the aid has come from a corpus of 60 speakers (men and women). The language aid allows users to model their speech against exemplars from young speakers or older speakers of Māori. This is important, because of the status of the elders in the Māori speaking community, but it also recognizes that Māori is undergoing substantial vowel change. The pronunciation aid gives feedback on vowel production via formant analysis, and selected words via speech recognition. The evaluation of the aid by 22 language teachers is presented and the resulting changes are discussed.