He Papakupu Reo Ture: A Dictionary of Māori Legal Terms

He Papakupu Reo Ture: A Dictionary of Māori Legal Terms is now available. He Papakupu Reo Ture was produced by the Legal Māori Project research team based at Victoria University’s Law Faculty. The team’s aim was to “provide a resource to speakers of te reo Māori that will assist such speakers to use Māori vocabulary to describe Western legal concepts”.

In 2008 we digitised hundreds of historical legal documents that were written in the Māori language. This data was used to help build a corpus of Māori legal language which the research team analysed to write the dictionary. These formed the He Pātaka Kupu Ture or Legal Māori Archive. Researchers can access the original documents or download the corpus of texts published before 1910 here: http://nzetc.victoria.ac.nz/tm/scholarly/tei-corpus-legalMaori.html

For further information on the Legal Māori Project refer to project homepage on the Victoria University of Wellington Law Faculty Website.