Welcome to Kiwi Words!

This website documents research on languages spoken in Aotearoa New Zealand, conducted by academics at the University of Waikato, NZ. Our work focuses on te reo Māori (the Indigenous language of Aotearoa) and varieties of English spoken across the country.

Each project explores a different aspect of language and draws on a different dataset. The datasets were collected by Waikato researchers in collaboration with our partners. Use the tabs to learn more about each project, including its objectives, research team and any resulting publications or media coverage.

Note: As of March 2025, this website is no longer actively maintained. Please visit calude.net for information about more recent projects!

GitHub Repository

Our GitHub repository provides code for each project, including data collection, cleaning and analysis.

Publications

• Trye, D., Calude, A. S., Harlow, R., & Keegan, T. T. (2024). Analysing A/O possession in Māori-language tweets. Languages, 9(8), 271. https://doi.org/10.3390/languages9080271
• Trye, D., Calude, A. S., Keegan, T. T., & Falconer, J. (2023). When loanwords are not lone words: Using networks and hypergraphs to explore Māori loanwords in New Zealand English. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 28(4), 461-499. https://doi.org/10.1075/ijcl.21124.try (Accepted manuscript, Code)
• Trye, D., Yogarajan, V., König, J., Keegan, T. T., Bainbridge, D., & Apperley, M. (2022, November). A hybrid architecture for labelling bilingual Māori-English tweets. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: AACL-IJCNLP 2022 (pp. 119-130). https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2022.aacl-ijcnlp-findings.12 (GitHub Repository, MET Corpus Explorer, Interactive Error Analysis)
• Burnette, J., & Long, M. (2022). Bubbles and lockdown in Aotearoa New Zealand: The language of self-isolation in #Covid19NZ tweets. Medical Humanities. https://doi.org/10.1136/medhum-2022-012401
• Burnette, J., & Calude, A. S. (2022). Wake up New Zealand! Directives, politeness and stance in Twitter #Covid19NZ posts. Journal of Pragmatics, 196, 6-23. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2022.05.002
• Trye, D., Keegan, T. T., Mato, P., & Apperley, M. (2022). Harnessing Indigenous Tweets: The Reo Māori Twitter corpus. Language Resources & Evaluation, 56, 1229-1268. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10579-022-09580-w
• Trye, D., Calude, A. S., Bravo-Marquez, F., & Keegan, T. T. (2020). Hybrid hashtags: #YouKnowYoureAKiwiWhen your tweet contains Māori and English. Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence, 3, 15. https://doi.org/10.3389/frai.2020.00015
• Trye, D., Calude, A. S., Bravo-Marquez, F., & Keegan, T. T. (2019). Māori loanwords: A corpus of New Zealand English tweets. In Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Student Research Workshop (pp. 136–142). Florence, Italy: Association for Computational Linguistics. https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/P19-2018

Funding

We are grateful to our funders for their generous support:

Thank you for visiting Kiwi Words!