‘The’ Waikato - or maybe not

Ever wondered why people sometimes say the Waikato, and other times just Waikato, or the Bay of Plenty, but sometimes only Bay of Plenty, or the South/North Island, while other times there’s no definite article?

OK it’s not the world’s most pressing issue, but it is the sort of thing that people who study language wonder about from time to time.

Some of the reasons for using - or not using - ‘‘the’’ seem pretty clear but they’re not being applied consistently.

Laurie Bauer, emeritus professor at Victoria University’s School of Linguistics and Applied Language Studies, even wrote a paper about it: ‘‘I tried to sort it out and didn’t have a lot of success.’’

Victoria University linguistics professor Miriam Meyerhoff has also given the matter some thought.

She and colleagues received a $580,000 Marsden Fund grant for a three-year study from 2016 looking at the impact Auckland’s increasing diversity is having on language change.

This year researchers have been focusing on pronunciation in a set of conversational interviews they’ve been doing in Auckland, but do intend to get onto ‘‘the’’ in its various forms.

‘‘My impression from our Auckland interviews is that the use of ‘‘the’’ to refer to New Zealand regions is more common in older speakers than in younger ones,’’ Meyerhoff said. ‘‘It may be a change that’s happening in New Zealand English.’’

One impression she had was that there was a tendency for people to try to be more correct in pronunciation of Ma¯ori place names. Since there was no ‘‘Te’’ in Waikato or Manawatu¯, it may mean people felt it was somehow better to use bald forms such as Waikato, Taranaki and Manawatu¯.

Possible support for that idea was that in places with a Ma¯ori version of a regional name and an English version, it was the Ma¯ori version that was losing the ‘‘the’’, Meyerhoff said. As an example she pointed to Taranaki, compared to ‘‘The Naki’’.

But that didn’t explain why places such as Bay of Plenty were losing the ‘‘the’’.

‘‘Generally, we are told that the rule of thumb is you get ‘the’ with places that are named after a geographical feature.’’

‘‘The’’ was also used when an adjective followed a noun in a place name, for example, the United Kingdom or the United States.

‘‘My working theory is that the other reason some of the New Zealand place names are losing their ‘‘the’’ is because we used to apply the general rules about structure and meaning, but now some of these regions are seen less and less as parts of the whole, and more as regions with their own character and identity.’’

That was kind of like what had happened with Ukraine, Meyerhoff said.

Bauer’s paper looked at why ‘‘the’’ was sometimes used in some New Zealand place names but not used at other times for the same names.

The general rule seemed to be that when the name began a breath group - defined by MirriamWebster as a ‘‘stretch of utterance between two pauses of sufficient length for an intake of breath to be made at each’’ - then there was no ‘‘the’’.

But other hypotheses could be suggested. ‘‘It is not entirely clear what the true generalisation here is,’’ Bauer said.

When it came to the North and South islands, most New Zealanders used ‘‘the’’ but British speakers commonly did not.

Turning to large regional areas, Bauer suggested ‘‘the’’ was used for some areas that were never officially provinces, for example Wairarapa and Waikato.

In such cases it was possible use of ‘‘the’’ remained while some kind of head noun had been dropped - for example, he Manawatu¯ district or the Manawatu¯ region.

‘‘There is more going on with these variable definite articles than I have been able to account for,’’ Bauer wrote. ‘‘More enterprising methods may be needed to sort out precisely what the implications of ‘the’ are in such instances.’’

He recommended students consider studying the topic, saying ‘‘there is something to be discovered’’.