The colonisation of the colour pink: variation and change in Māori's colour lexicon

All languages exhibit basic colour terms that manifest how distinct linguistic systems categorise colour. M & amacr;ori, the language of the indigenous people of New Zealand, demonstrates an instructive case where drastic innovations in colour terminology took place in response to environmental and cultural influences. We demonstrate how and when M & amacr;ori accrued new colour terms to replace existing ones in its immediate ancestor, Proto-Eastern-Polynesian, and eventually coined new colour terms through borrowing from native words for nature to match the English colour categories that did not previously exist in M & amacr;ori - except for the colour pink. While contemporary M & amacr;ori is at the same stage as English (Stage VII) in Berlin and Kay's colour term hierarchy, the evidence is that M & amacr;ori was at Stage IV pre-colonisation, possessing only five native colour categories. The evolution of M & amacr;ori's colour categories thus illuminates how colonisation may impact the basic vocabulary of a language, both in the M & amacr;ori settling a new land in the 13th century and in their subsequent language contact with English colonisers in the 19th century.