The colonization of the colour pink: colour names and colour categories in te reo Māori

Berlin and Kay's seminal 1969 work, "Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution", postulated that every language has a distinct set of colour categories described by basic colour terms and that the number of colour categories in a language grows as the language evolves, with categories being introduced in a particular order.

We use a range of resources to investigate colour naming in Māori and its predecessor, Proto-Eastern-Polynesian (PEP). The evidence indicates that both PEP and 19th century Māori had five colour categories (in English described as white/light, black/dark, red/brown, green/blue, and yellow). However, the colour names used vary significantly in the two languages, indicating a very strong influence on the language of settling in a new land between Māori settlement of Aotearoa in the 12th century and European colonization in the 19th.

We consider also mid-20th century Māori and modern Māori, showing that Māori first adopted loan words for English colour concepts (e.g., purple, orange) that were not present in traditional Māori. The revitalisation of te reo in the last decades has led to replacing loan words with borrowings from nature (e.g., poroporo, karaka) or compounds (e.g., māwhero, parauri). However, the modern teaching tools for te reo Māori appear to borrow heavily from the English understanding of colour categories, so there is a question of whether there is colonisation of the community's collective understanding of what a colour word refers to (e.g., whero could refer to English red, brown, or orange in 19th century Māori, but today's children are taught that whero is red).