Māori phonology

Māori has five phonemically distinct vowel articulations and ten consonant phonemes.

Vowels
Although it is commonly claimed that vowel realisations (pronunciations) in Māori show little variation, linguistic research has shown this not to be the case.

Vowel length is phonemic; but four of the five long vowels occur in only a handful of word roots, the exception being /ā/. As noted above, it has recently become standard in Māori spelling to indicate a long vowel by a macron. For older speakers, long vowels tend to be more peripheral and short vowels more centralised, especially with the low vowel, which is long but short. For younger speakers, they are both. For older speakers, /u/ is only fronted after /t/; elsewhere it is. For younger speakers, it is fronted everywhere, as with the corresponding phoneme in New Zealand English.

As in many other Polynesian languages, diphthongs in Māori vary only slightly from sequences of adjacent vowels, except that they belong to the same syllable, and all or nearly all sequences of nonidentical vowels are possible. All sequences of nonidentical short vowels occur and are phonemically distinct. With younger speakers, /ai, au/ start with a higher vowel than the [a] of /ae, ao/.

The following table shows the five vowel phonemes and the allophones for some of them according to Bauer 1997. Some of these phonemes occupy large spaces in the anatomical vowel triangle (actually a trapezoid) of tongue positions. For example, is sometimes realised (pronounced) as IPA.

Diphthongs are /a/ or /o/ followed by a mid or high vowel:.

Consonants
The consonant phonemes of Māori are listed in the following table. Seven of the ten Māori consonant letters have the same pronunciation as they do in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). For those that do not, the IPA phonetic transcription is included, enclosed in square brackets per IPA convention. Māori stops are nonaspirated, unlike in English. Māori is a tap, similar to the r in "very" in some British accents (and slightly less similar to the t in the American English pronunciation of "city" or "letter").

The pronunciation of is extremely variable, but its most common pronunciation (its canonical allophone) is the labiodental fricative, IPA  found in English. Another allophone is the bilabial fricative, IPA, which is usually supposed to be the sole pre-European pronunciation, although in fact linguists are not sure of the truth of this supposition.

Because English stops /p, t, k/ primarily have aspiration, speakers of English often hear the Māori nonaspirated stops as English /b, d, g/. However, younger Māori speakers tend to aspirate /p, t, k/ as in English. English speakers also tend to hear Māori /r/ as English /l/. These ways of hearing have given rise to place-name spellings which are incorrect in Māori, like Tolaga Bay in the North Island and Otago and Waihola in the South Island.

/ng/ can come at the beginning of a word, like sing-along without the "si", which is difficult for English speakers outside of New Zealand to manage.

/h/ is pronounced as a glottal stop,, and /wh/ as , in some western areas of North Island.

/r/ is typically a flap, especially before /a/. However, elsewhere it is sometimes trilled.

Syllables
Syllables in Māori have one of the following forms: V, VV, CV, CVV. This set of four can be summarised by the notation, (C)V(V), in which the segments in parentheses may or may not be present. A syllable cannot begin with two consonant sounds (the digraphs ng and wh represent single consonant sounds), and cannot end in a consonant, although some speakers may occasionally devoice a final vowel. All possible CV combinations are grammatical, though wo, who, wu, and whu occur only in a few loanwords from English such as wuru, "wool" and whutuporo, "football".

As in many other Polynesian languages, e.g., Hawaiian, the rendering of loanwords from English includes representing every English consonant of the loanword (using the native consonant inventory; English has 24 consonants to 10 for Māori) and breaking up consonant clusters. For example, "Presbyterian" has been borrowed as Perehipeteriana; no consonant position in the loanword has been deleted, but /s/ and /b/ have been replaced with /h/ and /p/, respectively.

Stress is typically within the last four vowels of a word, with long vowels and diphthongs counting double. That is, on the last four moras. However, stressed moras are longer than unstressed moras, so the word does not have the precision in Māori that it does in some other languages. It falls preferentially on the first long vowel, on the first diphthong if there is no long vowel (though for some speakers never a final diphthong), and on the first syllable otherwise. Compound words (such as names) may have a stressed syllable in each component word. In long sentences, the final syllable before a pause may have a stress in preference to the normal stressed syllable.