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How the Language Works

A plain guide to writing and saying Reo Māori Kūki ʻĀirani, and to how sentences are put together. You do not need to know any grammar words to use it — read a section, look at the example, and try it.

I make no claim to this knowledge — it belongs to the people who recorded it, and I am grateful for their work. Each section links to the source it draws on, and they are all gathered at the foot of the page under where this comes from, so you are welcome to go and read them in full.

Writing and sound

The 13 letters

The alphabet has 13 letters: a, e, ng, i, k, m, n, o, p, r, t, u, v. Ng counts as one letter and makes one sound — the sound at the end of the English word sing.

Read more: Orthography Guidelines, section 2 — the alphabet, vowels and consonants (PDF)

The ʻāmata

The ʻāmata is the small mark that looks like an apostrophe: ʻ. Some people call it a hamzah or a glottal stop. It is a tiny catch in the throat, and it is a real part of the word — leaving it out can change the meaning or make the word hard to recognise.

The macron

A macron is the bar written over a vowel: ā, ē, ī, ō, ū. It means you hold the vowel longer. The length is part of the word, so a missing macron can turn one word into another.

Read more: Orthography Guidelines — why long and short vowels change the meaning (PDF). To check how any word is spelled, including its macrons and ʻāmata, use the Dictionary of Cook Islands Languages — the Ministry recommends it as the first place to look.

Words and what they do

Naming words

Naming words — nomena — name a person, a place, a thing or an idea. They usually follow te (“the”), or te au when there is more than one.

Words for people

These words — piri nomena — stand in place of a name. Two things make them different from English. There is a separate form for exactly two people, and when you say “we” you choose whether the person you are talking to is included or not.

Word	Means
au	I, me
koe	you (one person)
ʻaia	he, she
tāua	we two — you and I
māua	we two — but not you
tātou	we all — you included
mātou	we all — but not you

Read more: Grammaire du maori des îles Cook — the fullest free list of the pronouns, with several examples for each. It is written in French; your browser will translate it.

Describing words

Describing words — ʻakataka nomena — tell you more about a naming word. They usually come after the word they describe, which is the opposite of English.

Comparing things

There is no ending like the English -er and -est. Instead you lean on the situation, repeat a word, or add an ending that strengthens it. -ngū is one of those.

Read more: Orthography Guidelines, section 3 — the list of prefixes and suffixes and what each one does (PDF)

Doing words

Doing words — verepa — are actions, events or states. They usually come near the start of a sentence, with a small word in front that tells you when it happened: kua for something finished, and ka for something still to come.

Verbs with and without an object

Some doing words need something for the action to land on. Others stand on their own. The same word can go either way depending on what you are saying.

Who did it, or what it happened to

You can put the doer first, or you can put the thing it happened to first. The second way often adds an ending such as -ia or -ngia.

Read more: Orthography Guidelines, section 3 (PDF) — it also explains when -ia is written as a separate word, which is what happens in the example above.

When, how and where

These words — piri verepa — add the time, the manner, the place, or how much.

Joining words

Joining words — kupu paʻupaʻu — tie two parts of a sentence together. They are very useful when one thing has happened and another is still to come.

Saying “who” and “that”

There is no single word for the English who, which or that. You say the naming word, then simply carry on and describe it.

Small linking words

Small linking words — perepetītīo — show where something is, where it is going, or where it came from. Two common ones are i (at, in, on) and ki (to).

Greetings and exclamations

Short words said on their own — to greet someone, to react, or to get attention.

Belonging, and repeating what was said

Two kinds of belonging

A and o both show that something belongs to someone, and English has no equivalent. Roughly: a is used when the person has charge of the thing or chose it, and o when they did not — parts of the body, family, where you are from, things that are simply so.

The safest way to learn these is not by rule but by pair: remember the word and its possessive together, the way you learn any other word.

Read more: Grammaire du maori des îles Cook sets out which things take ā and which take ō, with a long list of examples.

Repeating what someone said

You can give the exact words, or you can report what was meant. Kī means say or tell.

Everyday speech varies, so treat these as good models rather than fixed rules.

How sentences are built

How a sentence is ordered

English usually starts with who did something. Reo Māori Kūki ʻĀirani usually starts with what happened, and the person comes after. This is the single biggest difference to get used to.

Saying no

A positive sentence says something is so. A negative sentence says it is not. Kāre is the common word for no or not.

Read more: Grammaire du maori des îles Cook covers kāre and kore, and the small words (kua, ka, tē…nei, kia, ʻauraka) that set the time and the mood of a sentence.

Phrases and clauses

A phrase is a handful of words that work together but do not say that anything happened. A clause does say something happened. Put them together and you have a longer sentence.

Two names worth knowing: the subject is who or what is involved, and the predicate is what is said about them. In this language the predicate usually comes first.

Punctuation

Punctuation works as it does in English: a full stop ends a statement, a question mark ends a question, commas separate ideas, and names begin with a capital letter. Spell macrons and the ʻāmata consistently — they belong to the word.

Quotation marks show someoneʻs exact words. They are a modern way of writing rather than anything from spoken language. Keep the macrons and the ʻāmata inside the quotation exactly as they belong.

Where this comes from

Everything on this page already existed, free and open to anyone. The trouble is that it is scattered — a government PDF here, a university dictionary there, a school vocabulary list, a grammar written in French. None of it sits behind a paywall. Almost none of it is where a learner would think to look.

So I used the tools now available to read across all of it, put the same ideas in one order and in plain English, and name every source. Nothing here replaces the originals. This page is simply a door to them: one place where a learner can start, and every link below opens the material it came from, in full, at no cost.

Two books stand behind nearly all of the above, if you want the real thing: the Cook Islands Māori Dictionary (Buse, Taringa, Biggs & Moekaʻa, 1995) — the most authoritative work on the language — and Ko te Karāma o te Reo Māori o te Pae Tonga o Te Kuki Airani: A Grammar of Southern Cook Islands Māori (Nicholas, 2016).