Articulate the Kiwi way: perception insights from a language game corpus

This short communication reports on folk perceptions of New Zealand English lexical variation, specifically regarding which Māori loanwords are widely known by New Zealanders. We inspect the words used in a popular board game which has recently produced a New Zealand Edition – Articulate – and comb through these for all loanword uses, drawing comparisons with linguistics research and two popular websites containing lists of “Māori words every New Zealander should know” (Ministry for Culture and Heritage, 2022). We find remarkable overlap between the loanwords used in the board game and the former, but not the latter. The most frequent loanwords included are social culture loanwords, in line with research in other genres. The lack of consistency in spelling and macron usage leads us to believe that board games such as Articulate constitute rich sources for folk perceptions of language varieties, showing that even small-scale corpora can provide inroads into thorny questions regarding perceptions of contact-induced lexical variation.