Stephens and Boyce on The Struggle for Civic Space Between a Minority Legal Language and a Dominant Legal Language: The Case of Māori and English @MamariStephens @VicUniWgtn ‏

Māmari Stephens, Victoria University of Wellington, and Mary T. Boyce, University of Canterbury, have published "The Struggle for Civic Space between a Minority Legal Language and a Dominant Legal Language: The Case of Māori and English in Legal Language: A Comparative Perspective 289 (2016). Here is the abstract.

Our experience in creating a bilingual Māori-English legal dictionary (He Papakupu Reo Ture – a dictionary of legal Māori terms LexisNexis 2013) has shown us that legal lexicography offers fascinating insights into the relationship between the legal language for special purposes (LSP) of a dominant language such as English, and the legal LSP3 of a minority language such as Māori. This chapter demonstrates three particular insights. A diachronic corpus comprising texts of a threatened indigenous language will yield rich and useful data, but may not provide true comparability between texts. Investigation into how borrowings from the dominant language can change in usage over time yields potentially useful insights into lexical change in a diachronic corpus. Finally, paying particular attention to customary legal terms will yield insights into how an indigenous language absorbs and expresses Western legal concepts.

Download the chapter from SSRN at the link.