Māori pronunciation guide: vowels, wh, ng and macrons

Te reo Māori is spelt the way it sounds. It has fifteen sounds — five vowels, eight single consonants and two consonants written with two letters, wh and ng — and each letter keeps its sound wherever it appears. Learn those fifteen, and the line over a vowel, and you can say any word you can read.

Updated 6 October 2026 · 9 min read

Tap 🔊 to hear an example. Māori examples play Papa Reo, the te reo Māori voice made by Te Hiku Media from recordings of native speakers.

How many letters are in the Māori alphabet?

Fifteen. Thirteen are single letters — the five vowels a e i o u and the consonants h k m n p r t w — and two are pairs that stand for one sound each: ng and wh. Te Herenga Waka Victoria University of Wellington’s guide counts them the same way: fifteen distinct sounds, made of five vowels, eight consonants and two digraphs.

Treat ng and wh as letters in their own right, because Māori does. The Williams dictionary of the Māori language files ng as a separate letter after n, so a word beginning ng is not found among the words beginning n. Every other letter English has — b, c, d, f, g, j, l, q, s, v, x, y, z — is not part of the alphabet.

Two rules then do most of the work. Each letter stands for the same sound wherever it appears: there are no silent letters, and no letter changes its value with the spelling around it the way English c and g do. (A few sounds shift slightly with the next vowel, like the t described below, but always predictably.) And every syllable ends in a vowel.

The five vowels

Māori has five vowels, and each comes in two lengths. A long vowel is held for roughly twice as long as a short one, and the spelling marks it with a macron, the line over ā in whānau ‘family’. The English comparisons below are Victoria University’s, and they assume a New Zealand or British accent, in which the r of car and pork is not pronounced.

Vowel	Short, as in	Example	Long, as in	Example
a	aloud	tama ‘son, boy’	car	mā ‘white’
e	entry	kete ‘basket’	led, held longer	kēkē ‘armpit’
i	eat	iti ‘small’	peep	hī ‘to fish’
o	ordinary	ono ‘six’	pork	pō ‘night’
u	to	puku ‘stomach’	loot	tū ‘to stand’

The comparisons are a starting point, not an exact match. A single Māori vowel keeps its quality: it does not slide into another vowel the way the English vowel in go does. The e of kete ‘basket’ stays e to the end, and the o of ono ‘six’ does not turn into oh-oo.

Two vowels side by side

When two vowels meet, both are said. moana ‘sea’ is mo-a-na, three syllables, and Māori is Mā-o-ri. Some pairs run together into a gliding sound — the phonetic literature identifies ai, ae, ao, au and ou as diphthongs — but the glide still goes from one written vowel to the other. kai ‘food’ starts on an a and ends on an i.

What does a macron do in Māori?

It lengthens the vowel, and a longer vowel is a different vowel. The macron is part of the spelling, not an accent you may leave off: keke ‘cake’ and kēkē ‘armpit’ are two different words, and so are the pairs below.

Short	Means	Long	Means
keke	cake	kēkē	armpit
mana	prestige, authority	māna	for him, for her
kaka	garment; a plant stalk	kākā	the native forest parrot
wahine	woman	wāhine	women
tangata	person	tāngata	people
matua	parent, father	mātua	parents
tupuna	ancestor, grandparent	tūpuna	ancestors

The last four rows show the macron doing grammar. A handful of nouns make their plural by lengthening a vowel, so in writing the macron is what separates woman from women. The kaka row is longer than it looks, too: Te Aka Māori Dictionary also lists kakā ‘hot, inflamed’ and kāka ‘the Australasian bittern’, four words that differ only in which vowels are long.

Te Taura Whiri i te Reo Māori, the Māori Language Commission, advises using macrons on every word. The exception it makes is a personal, family, hapū or iwi name whose owners prefer to double the vowel instead.

Double vowels instead of macrons

The double vowel is another way of marking the same thing — aa for ā, ee for ē — and it is still the preferred spelling in Waikato. Waikato Museum, Te Whare Taonga o Waikato, writes te reo Maaori, following the preference of the region’s own iwi. If you meet Maaori in Hamilton, it is not a typo; it is the same word with its long vowel marked a different way. When you cannot type a macron, doubling the vowel is far better than leaving the length out.

How do you pronounce wh in Māori?

In most of the country today, like an English f. whare ‘house’ begins like far, and whānau ‘family’ begins with the same sound. Saying w is an easy mistake for an English speaker to make, because English has taught them to read wh that way, and the sound turns up in words you will use constantly: whenua ‘land’, whakapapa ‘genealogy’, whā ‘four’, whitu ‘seven’.

That said, f is the modern majority pronunciation rather than the only one, and the variation is old. The linguist Winifred Bauer, writing about the Whanganui spelling dispute, sets out what the research shows:

Across the language generally, the linguist Bruce Biggs described it as a soft f made with both lips, like blowing out a candle — and a recording of a speaker born in the 1880s shows five different pronunciations of wh in a single hour, none of them a plain w.
In the far north, a breathy hw is at least as likely as an f.
In Taranaki, and up the Whanganui River as far as Taumarunui, the h of Māori became a glottal stop — the catch in the middle of uh-oh — before Europeans arrived. There wh is a glottal stop followed by w.

That last point is the likeliest reason, in Bauer’s view, that the city of Whanganui was spelt Wanganui for so long: English settlers did not register the glottal stop and wrote down only the w. Bauer gives the meaning as ‘big bay’, from whanga ‘bay’ and nui ‘big’ (other published sources differ — see Māori place names and what they mean), and in 2009 the Minister for Land Information decided the official spelling would be Whanganui. If you are learning standard Māori, say f; if you hear something else from a speaker of another dialect, that is their dialect, not a mistake.

How do you pronounce ng in Māori?

As the ng in singer — not the ng in finger, which adds a g. It is one sound, made with the back of the tongue against the soft palate, and English has it too, only never at the start of a word.

That is the whole difficulty: Māori puts it at the start of a word all the time. ngā ‘the (plural)’ is one of the commonest words in the language, and ngeru ‘cat’, ngahere ‘forest’ and ngākau ‘heart’ all begin with it. The way in is to say singer, then say it again without the si: what is left at the start is the sound you want. Do not replace it with n or with n-g.

In the southern dialect of the South Island, k takes the place of ng in many words, so a southern speaker may say k where the standard language has ng.

The other consonants

Most of the rest are close to English, with three differences worth knowing.

Letter	How it sounds	Example
r	A single quick tap of the tongue, as in the tt of American butter. Not the English r, and not rolled for long.	reo ‘language’
t	Lighter than English. Before a, e, o it can sound almost like a d to English ears; before i and u it has a slight hiss.	tama ‘son, boy’, tū ‘to stand’
k	Less of the puff of air that follows an English k.	kai ‘food’
p	As in English.	puku ‘stomach’
h	As in English.	hoa ‘friend’
m, n, w	As in English.	moana ‘sea’, nui ‘big’, wai ‘water’

The r is the one to practise. An English r in aroha ‘love’ or kōrero ‘to speak’ is instantly noticeable, while a light tap makes the word sound right even if everything else is still rough.

Why every Māori syllable ends in a vowel

Māori syllables are a vowel on its own, or one consonant followed by a vowel, with no consonant ever closing a syllable. Two consonants never stand side by side either — ng and wh are single sounds, so they do not count. That makes long words far easier than they look: break them after each vowel.

whakapapa ‘genealogy’ is wha-ka-pa-pa.
kōrero ‘to speak’ is kō-re-ro.
tamariki ‘children’ is ta-ma-ri-ki.
Aotearoa ‘New Zealand’ is A-o-te-a-ro-a.

Stress follows rules of its own, partly decided across the whole phrase, and is best learned by listening. One reliable pattern from the research: a syllable with a long vowel outranks the others, so mōrena ‘good morning’ and whānau ‘family’ lean on their first, long syllable.

New Zealand place names, said properly

Place names are where most people first meet te reo, and where the English habits show most. Every spelling below is the official one in the New Zealand Gazetteer.

Place	Said	What to watch
Taupō	Tau-pō	The ō is long, as in pork. The Māori pronunciation is roughly ‘toe-paw’, not the anglicised ‘tow-po’; the macron became part of the town’s official name in 2019.
Whangārei	Wha-ngā-rei	Three things at once: wh as f in standard Māori, ng as in singer, and a long ā carrying the stress.
Paraparaumu	Pa-ra-pa-ra-u-mu	Six syllables. The local shortenings ‘Paraparam’ and ‘Pram’ drop the end of the name, which is umu ‘earth oven’.
Whakatāne	Wha-ka-tā-ne	wh as f, and the long ā.
Ngāruawāhia	Ngā-ru-a-wā-hi-a	It opens with ng, and every vowel is said, two of them long.
Paekākāriki	Pa-e-kā-kā-ri-ki	Two long vowels in a row, and a tapped r.
Rotorua	Ro-to-ru-a	Four syllables: the u and the a are both said.

Paraparaumu shows why the full name is worth the effort. It is made of parapara ‘scraps, leftovers’ and umu ‘earth oven’, and Kahu Ropata told RNZ that it recalls a war party that reached the Kāpiti Coast around 1819–20, famished, and found nothing of substance. A shortening that cuts off the umu cuts off the story.

What to practise first

In order of how much each will improve the way you sound (and for a day-by-day plan that starts with these sounds, see learn Māori for beginners: your first 30 days):

Pure vowels. Say kete ‘basket’, iti ‘small’, ono ‘six’ and puku ‘stomach’ without letting any vowel drift into another.
Long against short. Say keke ‘cake’ and kēkē ‘armpit’, then wahine ‘woman’ and wāhine ‘women’, until the difference is obvious. Then write every macron, every time.
wh as f. whare ‘house’, whānau ‘family’, whenua ‘land’.
ng at the start of a word. ngā ‘the (plural)’, ngeru ‘cat’.
The tapped r. aroha ‘love’, kōrero ‘to speak’.

Then learn words whole, from a speaker. Verbavia’s te reo Māori course plays its examples in Papa Reo’s native voice, and a common word is the quickest pronunciation drill there is — the Māori frequency list shows which come first, and how many Māori words you need explains how far they take you. With the sounds in place, the Māori greetings are the obvious first phrases to say out loud, and how hard te reo is to learn covers what comes after pronunciation. Many of these sounds already live in New Zealand English, in the Māori words Kiwis use every day.