The effect of typographic text presentation on reader perceptions of importance in bilingual Māori–English picturebooks

With the establishment of Māori medium education in the 1980s, picturebooks featuring Te Reo Māori have been needed and are increasingly being developed, produced, and used in full immersion and mainstream education in Aotearoa New Zealand. In recent years, the number of bilingual picturebooks featuring Te Reo Māori and English has increased. Improved access to bilingual picturebooks in a society that includes both an Indigenous and colonial language as two of its three official languages is vital to support the status of Te Reo Māori as an official language and to support English speakers learning Te Reo Māori. Studies by Daly ( Dual-Language Picturebooks in Māori and English , 2016, and The Linguistic Landscape of English–Spanish Dual-Language Picturebooks , 2017) have explored the layout of such bilingual picturebooks, suggesting that the order of languages reflects the linguistic hierarchy or relative status of the two languages. Yet, to date, no empirical studies have investigated how designers’ typographic order choices affect readers’ perceptions of the status of languages. In this article, we present the findings from a mixed-methods study of 50 readers’ perceptions of typographic and linguistic hierarchy in pages of bilingual picturebooks when the order of languages was a variable. Results show that order did affect the opinions of readers, and this effect varied depending on the linguistic repertoire of the participants.